At the Voice of America Learning Center, university administration and the Faculty Alliance of Miami (FAM) met for the third bargaining session to decide budgeted raises, suspended governance committees and academic freedom.
At the meeting on Sept. 26, Cathy Wagner, a professor in the Department of English and chair of the organizing committee, said that the faculty union tried to reopen the conversation with administration about reactivating the Benefits and Faculty Welfare Committee and were given “a flat no.” She said the administration's reasoning stems from the committee doing work that deals with mandatory subjects of bargaining, including wages and working conditions.
“We disagree with that because those committees are strictly advisory,” Wagner said. “They don’t make any decisions.”
Wagner said administration has also suspended the All-Faculty Committee on Evaluation of Administrators and would not talk about or consider unsuspending it at the meeting. The committee surveys the faculty to evaluate top university officials including the provost and deans, creates a report and turns that report over to the provost and president to evaluate. However, the president does not get evaluated.
“That was really shocking because … the committee is a special committee. It’s defined and [has] a membership and everything,” Wagner said. “It’s defined in what's effectively the constitution of Miami University, which is the enabling act.”
The Board of Trustees has already allotted 2% of the budget toward raises shown in the meeting minutes for June 2022, Wagner said, but has only offered raises for faculty who aren’t unionized.
“We decided as a membership. We voted as a membership to do an MOU, a Memorandum of Understanding, ahead of the contract … that says we wanted to have the 2% percent raise that's already been extended to other faculty and staff,” Wagner said. “And they rebuked it and this time, they said they were really finally rebuking it.”
According to the Miami University Labor Relations website, “The University reiterated that it intends to negotiate compensation, including the MOU for a 2% increase, when the parties fully engage in discussions on all other economic proposals.”
The bargaining update stated the university asked the union questions regarding their Sept. 12 Academic Freedom proposal to better understand the goals the proposal was striving to accomplish.
“The Union stated they were unaware of any incidents in which a faculty member’s rights for Academic Freedom were violated under the current policies,” the update reads.
Representing FAM at the bargaining table is a team of 11 professors, chaired by Phill Alexander, a professor of games in the department of Emerging Technology in Business and Design. Wagner is not a part of the negotiating team.
Ginny Boehme, a science librarian at Miami, confirmed that the four administrators representing Miami “at the table” include Chris Makaroff, dean of the College of Arts and Science; Sarah Kelley, deputy general counsel; Melissa Thomasson, associate dean in the Farmer School of Business; and Moira Casey, an associate in the College of Liberal Arts and Applied Science.
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Kelley denied request to comment at this time as she is providing legal advice to Miami.
Also present at the bargaining table are two law firms, hired by Miami, to oversee separate negotiations for the faculty and librarian unions. Wagner said the State Employment Relations Board decided to separate the tenure track and TCPL and librarian units into two.
Jazmyn Barrow and Cristina Correnti are lawyers with the firm Ogletree Deakins and oversee Miami’s faculty unit. Meanwhile, Jourdan Day and Sarah Squillante are lawyers from the firm Porter Wright for Miami’s librarian unit.
According to assignment letters acquired by The Miami Student, Barrow was assigned on July 1 for labor counsel at a rate of $350 an hour with a max budget of $100,000. The university has also set aside a maximum budget of $209,000 for Porter Wright, $175,000 of which is tagged for “labor advice.”
For the 2023 fiscal year, which ran from July 1, 2022, through June 30, 2023, Miami paid Porter Wright more than $300,000, as well as $15,750 to Ogletree Deakins. As of Sept. 22 of this year, the university has not paid Ogletree Deakins, but it has paid Porter Wright $8,330 so far.
The university and FAM are scheduled to meet Oct. 18 at the Wilks Conference Center on Miami’s Hamilton campus, a location proposed by the union during the Sept. 12 bargaining session.
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