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Bill of Rights for Higher Ed Workers

MTA higher ed members are raising their voices and outlining their demands for better pay and working conditions. Classified staff and adjunct, contingent and part-time faculty have created a Bill of Rights with frameworks for future contracts.

Classified Staff Bill of Rights by UMass Unions United Classified Staff Coalition

As classified staff, we keep the University of Massachusetts system operating. We perform myriad essential services, including maintenance, trades, administrative, technical and other educational support functions. Our work is necessary to maintain our campus infrastructure and to meet the needs of students, faculty and the community. We deserve dignity and respect in the workplace and that starts with fair contracts that adequately reflect our value to the University of Massachusetts and to the Commonwealth. Treating classified staff with dignity and respect requires management to listen to our needs and concerns and recognize, at a minimum, these rights.

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The tenants of the Classified Staff Bill of Rights

FAIR WAGES. Classified staff must have wages that keep pace with inflation and increases in costs for our health insurance. No job shall require more than seven years to reach the top salary step, and the university must ensure job classifications accurately recognize workers’ responsibilities, skills and experience. The university must routinely update classifications, raising lower-graded positions and adding new, higher-graded classified titles.
EQUAL BENEFITS. All staff deserve the same level of benefits. Classified staff must have leave and other benefits — including vacation time, family leave and robust sick leave banks — that are equal to their professional staff colleagues.
FULL STAFFING. The university must make every effort to retain and attract classified staff to maintain full staffing – including by offering competitive wages and benefits – so that workloads are manageable, out-of-title work is minimized, and student, faculty and institutional needs are met.
JOB SECURITY, HEALTHY WORKPLACES AND PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY. The university shall ensure that all classified staff employees have safe and healthy workplaces, as well as the necessary tools and training to succeed. The university shall not enact austerity measures at the expense of providing dignified employment to workers and high-quality education to students. UMass must instead pledge to support public employees and avoid subjecting them to furloughs and layoffs, as well as not outsourcing or contracting out work done by classified staff employees.

Adjunct, Contingent and Part-Time Faculty Bill of Rights

We are highly educated, long-term, engaged academic faculty who teach across the state’s 15 community colleges and nine state universities. We love teaching and value working with students. For many of us, this is our primary source of income. We have spent years on our campuses, invested in their growth, and we maintain vast amounts of institutional knowledge.

Without us, no public higher education institution in the state would be able to operate, yet we are consistently treated as inconsequential and disposable. Regardless of the number of years we have worked or the number of classes we have taught per semester, we are not paid a living wage, do not receive benefits, and have no job security.

This treatment is shameful and a stain on the reputation of our public colleges and universities. Adjunct, contingent and part-time faculty deserve better.

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Tenants of the Adjunct, Contingent and Part-Time Faculty Bill of Rights

PAY. We deserve to earn a living wage and to be compensated in a way that is equitable to our tenure-track colleagues. We deserve the opportunity for regular pay increases. For many of us, adjunct, contingent and part-time faculty work is our primary source of income. Yet we earn substantially less than our counterparts.
JOB SECURITY. Job Security. We deserve reasonable job protections. We need fair course assignments, longer-term contracts, timely notice of course assignments and sufficient advance notice of non-reappointment. We have no opportunity for job growth or guaranteed employment semester to semester. Our classes can be changed or canceled at the last minute, and we often don’t have contracts in hand before the first day of class.
RETIREMENT.We deserve a secure retirement with appropriate employer contributions to the Commonwealth’s state retirement system. Dignified retirement is a universal right. However, as employees of the Commonwealth, we do not earn Social Security benefits. Our employer does not make employer contributions to our retirement funds, to which we are required to contribute eight percent of our salary.
HEALTHCARE. We deserve access to the same health care benefits as every other state worker in the Commonwealth. Access to affordable health care is a universal right, but the Commonwealth provides no insurance care benefits to us regardless of the number of classes we teach or years served.
RESOURCES. We deserve access to office space on the campuses where we teach, adequate teaching equipment (including laptops) and materials, and opportunities for continued training and professional development. The majority of us do not have space to meet with students on our campuses or institution-provided laptops and are excluded from professional development.
RECOGNITION. We deserve acknowledgement for our years of service to our academic institutions, including our dedication to students and contributions to departments and campus culture. Despite the fact that most of us have been teaching on our campuses for more than a decade, there is no campus-wide acknowledgement of our existence.

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