Green River Negotiation Team Ushers in a New Faculty Contract

The United Faculty of Green River (UF) negotiations team and administration team have come to a tentative agreement on the newest faculty contract.

On April 16, Janey Hoene, UF president and co-chair of the negotiations team, sent out an all-faculty e-mail announcing the completion of the bargaining process. Significant changes to the contract were shared the following Friday, April 20, with the rest of the faculty.

The two teams are in the process of taking feedback from faculty and will hold a ratification vote during finals week of spring quarter. If the vote passes, it will go into effect July 1 after the previous contract expires on June 30.  

Marshall Sampson, the vice president for Human Resources and Legal Affairs and co-chair of the admin team, said that the contract will cover 179 tenure, tenure-track, or one-year temporary faculty, as well as approximately 382 adjunct faculty members.

In this new contract, faculty could see a four percent raise overall for tenure, tenure-track, and adjunct faculty. There will also be a 2 percent cost of living (COLA) raise that was approved separately from the contract by state legislature.  The COLA’s will go into effect on July 1 of 2018 and again on Jan. 1 of 2019.

Since they are mostly dictated by the state, benefits such as healthcare are not negotiated in the contract.

Those on the tenure-track will not experience many if any changes. According to Hoene and Sampson, the only changes made in the area of tenure had to do with language and contents of the tenure book.

One of the biggest changes pertains to course load available to adjunct faculty. In the past, according to Hoene, adjunct faculty have been limited to teaching what is called eight-ninths. “Assuming regular five credit classes, it means they would teach eight five-credit classes in the academic year: fall, winter, and spring,” Hoene said.

In the proposed contract, Hoene said that this cap would be lifted to 12/9 or 15/9. “The hope is that it will allow adjunct faculty to kind of make this their campus and make this their college and make it feel like this is their home.”

Since the release of significant changes to faculty, the new contract has received mostly a positive response. The UF leadership are taking feedback and have been posed with a number of questions and are taking their time to explain why they chose certain things. Any changes that need to be made will be presented to the Board of Trustees by UF leadership.

If faculty members come up with a concern, the teams will head back to the table and discuss how to fit it into the contract. “We were eight people sitting at a table discussing something that’s going to affect a lot more than eight people. We might not have thought of every single thing that could happen,” Sampson said.

In comparison to the previous contract, the newest version was bargained much quicker. According to Hoene and Sampson, the previous contract took anywhere from 20 months to two years whereas the new version took approximately three months.

The teams chose to use a sort of collaborative bargaining during the process, which began in Jan. with some training through the Public Employees Relation Commission. “In collaborative bargaining it’s not really that either side kind of takes the lead, it’s really more that both sides say ‘These are the interests that we have in this negotiation’ then we work from those interests toward common goals and see if we can create as many win-win situations as we can,” Hoene said.

This is the first time in nearly two decades there has been an agreement so soon. The last contract was bargained under President Eileen Ely, who resigned back in 2016. “It’s definitely a new administration, but I think we are all in a better place, too,” Hoene said. “Going into the last negotiations there was a lot of tension going into them; there was a lot of uncertainty. I think the rapport and relationship between faculty and administration was already stressed going into that.”

Both Hoene and Sampson felt that this time around, the teams were much more unified than they had been in the past. “We had a team that agreed on a lot of things this time,” Sampson said. “We did three sessions on Friday and we did two-weekend sessions and it was very nice to be able to sit down and talk about what we wanted to accomplish and go toward those common goals.”

The new contract, if ratified, would last until June 30, 2020.