Ithaca College

Not sure if anyone actually reads this, but here it goes:
Would the Administration kindly respond to this comment and
let us know if the initial Intercom posting is inaccurate
or not.

The full-time contingent faculty and the part-time contingent faculty members of the bargaining committee have made it clear to the administration since the spring of 2016 that we are in solidarity with each other and want to be considered as a single bargaining unit. The administration, following the old adage of "divide and conquer," has refused our request, hoping thereby to weaken the union effort at IC. This has failed, and we continue to stand with each other in support, whether we are part-time or full-time contingent faculty. As Dave writes, the vote taking place today and tomorrow involves all contingent faculty, not just the part-timers.

Professor Kornreich, full-time contingent faculty member and member of the Contingent Faculty Union bargaining team, is correct: Today's vote is for ALL contingent faculty to make our voices heard on the administration's refusal to seriously engage at the bargaining table with issues of job security and faculty continuity for full-time contingent faculty and equal pay for equal work for part-time contingent faculty.

In recent announcements, the administration attempts to paint themselves as reasonable partners in the bargaining process. But in fact, their approach to bargaining has been characterized by an insistent refusal to seriously engage in the issues most pressing to our membership, a membership that comprises 41% of IC's faculty.

One very recent example of this occurred when the administration returned our proposal for increased job security for full-time contingent faculty, a comprehensive proposal that would provide greater faculty continuity on campus while preserving staffing flexibility for chairs and higher ups, and which is almost identical to a similar job security proposal for part-timers recently agreed to by administration. After considering the full-timers' proposal without response for over six months (it is only 4 pages long), the administration returned it to us with a red line striking every provision that would create any change whatsoever to current full-time contingent contracts. In other words, after six months of stalling the administration simply said "No" and offered no alternatives to fixing the current broken system. This is but one example of the bargaining approach displayed by our administration throughout these past 16 months, an approach that led directly to this strike authorization vote.

Those of us serving on the Contingent Faculty Union bargaining committee have been witness to an administration completely out of touch with the problems and issues facing this campus, with no ideas of their own about how to fix such issues, and a desire instead to simply retain as much power for themselves as they can, regardless of the effects on IC's educational mission. This is not the kind of leadership IC needs. We are voting Yes in the strike authorization vote to tell administration in no uncertain terms to do the right thing.

Like Professor Kornreich above, I am a full-time contingent faculty member (on a one-year contract) and a member of the bargaining committee, and I can assure everyone that we are ALL voting today and tomorrow.

As a full-time faculty member, I have seen the administration stall on our job security proposal for months, then hand it back with a "counterproposal" that was essentially a strikethrough of everything we suggested. Full-time contingent faculty are valued and loyal members of this institution, but we have no sense of stability and no ability to plan our lives, living year to year without knowing if the college is going to commit to us as we've committed to it.

I'm deeply disturbed that the administration would put out false information like this. I can't tell if it's because they're so detached from the bargaining process and from their own faculty's needs that they actually don't KNOW what's happening, or if it's actually malicious. In either case, it's just another indication of how little the administration cares about or even thinks about us.

If I wasn't already going to vote YES to authorize labor action, I definitely would after this.

If you are a full-time or part-time contingent faculty member, vote to authorize our contingent faculty union to take action up to and including a strike!

WHEN: Monday 2/13 and Tuesday 2/14 from 9AM-5PM
WHERE: The Fishbowl inside Campus Center (in the Food Court, near the Starbucks)