Dear Members,

The semester seems to be flying by. It feels like it was September only yesterday but we really only have two weeks of classes left before finals.  Election season is (finally) behind us and while the outcome makes some of us very anxious, we will have to wait and see what will happen. EMUFT is proud to have participated in an AFT Michigan and AFL-CIO voter registration effort that brought student ambassadors to some of our classes to present information on voter registration.

Last Friday, November 15, we held our quarterly Membership Council meeting. While we had hoped for stronger attendance, those in attendance provided your union council with a lot of feedback on our activities this past quarter as well as ideas for the coming semester. Included in the President's Report were some of the items in this newsletter as well as the following:

• EMUFT is financially stable with strong savings (for details please contact Paul Kominsky, our treasurer).

• We keep growing our list of Department Stewards. Most recently, we welcomed: Ron Rich, Sociology, Anthropology & Criminology, and Linette Lao, English. If you want to see who your Department Steward is, check out the Steward page on our website  or if you want to learn more about what it means to be a Union Steward, please contact our Chief Steward Maria Goodrich at emuftchiefsteward@gmail.com

• We continue our coalition-building efforts with unions across campus. Currently, much of this happens through the All-Union Council which meets about 4-5 times a year with President Smith and Provost Longworth. In the most recent meeting, we were also joined by a representative from the Board of Regents. During these meetings, we cover any number of issues impacting EMU employees ranging from ADA procedures to hiring practices to the results of the employee satisfaction survey earlier this year. Hopefully, our efforts will soon expand to an All-Union Welcome Back Social.

Much of the Union Council's time and effort this past semester has been focused on better understanding Shared Governance at the University and the effects of the systematic exclusion and disenfranchisement of Lecturers from all input processes in departments and colleges on Lecturers. Currently, a single department grants voting rights to only their Full-Time Lecturers and only on curriculum matters. Some of the challenges with our exclusion from input processes that were discussed last Friday are the following:

• Departments make decisions about curriculum matters for classes and programs taught primarily by lecturers without ever discussing the change with the principal instructors. These changes range from simple matters such as textbook choices to much more significant challenges such as program elimination. 

• Department Head and School Director search committees only include tenured and tenure-track faculty. As a consequence, this group is usually the only employee group deciding on the next chair of the department. This ignores the fact that the new chair will be our boss as well. 

• Department or College reorganization efforts are made without our input. This can mean that our contract is violated and that our working conditions change dramatically. For example, if a department is restructured, lecturers who teach in multiple areas of that department might lose part of the workload and/or rank. For Full-Time Lecturers, this could mean a loss of full-time status. 

In addition to learning more about the challenges with our exclusion from input processes, your Union Council has also engaged with both the Administration and the AAUP Leadership to see how this situation might be addressed in the future. One fact remains, a recent survey of administrators and AAUP faculty indicated that while a majority believes that FTLs, staff, and students need to be part of input and shared governance, a majority also believe that PTLs ought not to, further underlining the systematic disenfranchisement of and disrespect toward one particular group of employees. We outlined many of these challenges in our Report on Lecturer Input & Communication, presented to the Board of Regents and the Administration in February of this year.

We hope to continue our conversation about this issue in the months to come and invite you to reach out to us with any feedback or concerns that you might have. 

Your Union Council