This Wednesday, May 15, the FAMCO Bargaining Team conducted our sixth negotiating session that lasted 7 hours. Present for the administration’s team were Provost Rich Veit, Associate Provost Susan Gupta, VP Christine Benol, VP Joseph Pingitore, VP Jim Pillar, MU General Charlene Diana, and Senior Paralegal Karen Morrow. As a reminder, leading the negotiations for the administration, despite the substantial allocation of senior management time and university resources to their bargaining team, is attorney John Romeo from Gibbons Law, an external law firm President Leahy has retained to negotiate against the MU faculty.

First, the good news is the FAMCO bargaining team has made some important progress on non-economic proposals we have presented to the administration in previous bargaining sessions. Among others, we have signed tentative agreements on a number of proposals that provide increased accountability in ensuring due process in grievance proceedings; continued COVID compassionate review provisions; expanded contract language that asserts the parties’ shared values in ensuring a non-hostile, non-toxic workplace; and protections for faculty against investigation without the notice to general counsel. In addition, the administration agreed to accept our proposal on priority scheduling that will now protect full-time faculty’s right to have first priority in all course selections in all terms, not just the summer sessions, before administration can consider calling on adjunct labor. 

However, the FAMCO bargaining team has also shared proposals important to our members that the administration has yet to fully address, at times arguing that they are holding their counters until the parties have entered deliberations over more squarely economic matters, and at other times, simply not coming prepared with a full response. At the last bargaining session, we put significant pressure on the administration to respond to our proposal to address the specific needs of our clinical faculty that the administration initially deemed economic, and a preliminary discussion was able to begin. We will continue to press for a substantive response in upcoming sessions.

Similarly, FAMCO’s proposal to create a more stable work environment by decreasing the number of adjunct faculty, increasing the number of tenure track lines, and providing a pathway to tenure for our full-time non-tenure track faculty who choose to apply, has also been deemed largely economic, and a full response from the administration has yet to be provided. In providing preliminary feedback on this proposal, the administration has insinuated that overreliance on contingent instructional labor at Monmouth is a result of necessary cost-cutting measures the administration needs to make to offset their willingness to allocate course reductions to full-time faculty and to permit tenure stream faculty to retain a 3-3 load (as opposed to a 4-4). We will continue to listen closely for any circular reasoning that suggests that Monmouth University has little choice but to save the institution of tenure by undermining it through the persistent overreliance on contingent labor. 

Additionally, FAMCO shared a proposal that would afford our senior lecturers and senior specialists an appropriate level of professional respect and dignity in the review process, a proposal that, at present, the administration has found to be unacceptable to them. We await their counter to that proposal, or a confirmation that they are refusing to engage further here.

On our list of troubling developments, the administration shared several non-economic proposals that would limit academic freedom of our faculty and expose our students further to the predatory practices of EdTech companies. On key items here, the administration has acknowledged that “we have a fundamental disagreement” when it comes to these proposals.

Overall, on the positive side, we have been able to make recent progress on non-economic proposals that we know will benefit our members. We are committed to resuming our discussions on a number of proposals that the administration continues to slow walk or hold, for the time being. 

WHAT’S NEXT?

In anticipation of upcoming discussions of our economic proposals, the FAMCO team has been reviewing financial and healthcare benefits data provided by the University. In doing so, it is clear that MU faculty salaries have not kept up with inflation in the period covering our current contract (2021-2024). Collectively, MU full-time faculty lost a total of 1.3 million in salary, with an average individual loss of $6,573, in just the single academic year of 2023-2024. For context, for the three-year period between 2019-2022, President Leahy, alone, received $2,767,217 in total compensation.

SHOWING UP TO S.E.A.L. THE DEAL!

A special shout out to our members who have been willing to step up as observers and support us all in our efforts to win a fair agreement (check out some of our committed members below!). Their presence in the negotiating room has been our strength! 

Finally, did you see that FAMCO sent congratulations gift packages to the renowned artists honored during the 2024 Bruce Springsteen Center Awards Ceremony this April? This year, the Center selected award recipients for, among other amazing contributions, their notable commitments to social justice. In our notes of congratulations, we welcomed the award winners into the Monmouth community, and assured them that Monmouth has a faculty union that also shares their recognized and important commitments to equity and fairness! 

If you’d like to support us by being an observer during bargaining, or you are ready to do your part in some other way to win the strong contract that you and your colleagues deserve, please contact our field organizer Sanjana Ragudaran at sragudar@monmouth.edu