Part-time faculty file mediation

After nine months of salary negotiations, Portland State’s part-time faculty union will move on to the mediation process of the collective bargaining agreement with university administrators next week.

In a press conference Tuesday afternoon, members of the American Federation of Teachers Local 3571, called the Portland State University Faculty Association, met with other supporters on what they referred to as an exploitation of part-time and adjunct faculty by the university.

Margi McCue, vice president of collective bargaining for the PSU Faculty Association and adjunct Women’s Studies professor, said the faculty negotiation process has been stressful and filled with negativity.

With an 18 percent total operating budget increase PSU received from the state legislature this year, McCue said, the PSU Faculty Association was hoping for a greater financial investment in part-time faculty salaries.

McCue said the union was told that the budget increase would not give part-time faculty more money because their salaries come from tuition instead of state funds. McCue said the average part-time staff member makes about $34,000 in a nine-month school year and the current PSU proposal doesn’t even bring their salary up to a living wage.

PSU Faculty Association president Brooke Jacobson said a possible strike is still a ways out, but things aren’t going very smoothly.

“We are definitely under strain,” Jacobson said.

The PSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which represents PSU’s full-time faculty, also filed for mediation for their own collective bargaining agreement sessions earlier this month.

According to the PSU Faculty Association winter 2008 newsletter, they requested a raise of $60 per credit hour, to be paid retroactively, and a $65 per credit hour raise effective Sept. 2008. The newsletter states that they were offered $28 per credit hour, effective Dec. 16, 2007, and $32 per credit hour, effective fall term 2008.