​If you have been reading your FSW emails, you are aware that Dr. DeLuca is no longer going to be our provost.  This was announced in an email from our president on Friday.  If you haven't read your emails lately, please do so, as decisions are being made that will affect faculty.
 
Now that Dr. DeLuca will no longer be a member of the BOTs bargaining team, the union team is going to be re-thinking our bargaining strategies.  For the past three years, we had been working closely with Dr. DeLuca on which parts of the contract we would need to make better for faculty and administration.  Many of the decisions we were making on contract language were based on these discussions. 
 
Right now, we have no idea who will be making the decisions for the administration.  Although Dr. McClinton will be "acting provost" we suspect any major decisions will not be made until the new interim provost arrives in August.
 
We are meeting with UFF on Tuesday to see how this change in leadership will affect our bargaining plans.
 
At the June 22 BOT meeting, the board approved a 4% increase on base for staff.  Then the president announced another "tip" of 2% non-reoccurring.   Since faculty salaries are negotiated, no money was put into the budget for faculty salaries.  In the past, the faculty usually received what the staff was given, although a couple times we may have gotten a bit more.
 
However, this will give us an idea of what we will probably be offered when we get to financials.  Be thinking about how we should react if we are offered the same raise as staff.

 
On June 6, the FSW-FF Bargaining Team met with the BOT team to go over ground rules and indicate which articles in the present contract we will present for discussion in the upcoming sessions.
 
The union team was surprised when Susan Bronstein announced that their team would not be available to begin actual bargaining until after the June 22 BOT meeting.
 
The session ended quickly with July dates set for the next meeting.
 
This announcement was not good news for the bargaining team as we had hopes of wrapping up the contract talks before everyone took off on vacation in July.  Now it appears as though we will still be bargaining language into August.
 
Salary will be negotiated last.