The newly formed bargaining unit of adjunct and part-time faculty has been working on three main fronts since joining the Service Employees International Union Local 509 in December: gathering information about their constituents' main concerns, increasing the number of faculty actively involved in the union and requesting full information from the University about current members’ contracts.

The organizing committee of Brandeis Faculty Forward, the coalition of professors who led the charge while the faculty was unionizing, now call themselves the contract action team and have formed several subcommittees to handle these initiatives.

Prof. Amy Todd (Rabb) told the Justice in a phone interview that she is serving on the bargaining priorities sub-committee, which distributed a preliminary survey to the bargaining unit members in December. This survey was set to gain cursory information about professors’ priorities. The sub-committee is distributing a more detailed, eight to nine-page survey next week, according to Prof. Chris Abrams (FA), a member of the contract action team. The initial survey asked faculty to simply rank the issues they feel are most important in order of personal preference, according to a Dec. 18 Justice article.

“We have spent a lot of time over this past year having conversations with faculty and finding out what some of the issues are that we’re really interested in,” Abrams told the Justice in a phone interview. “This will be a much more formal way of gathering that information.” The information will most likely be analyzed by a committee who will start to form a negotiating strategy according to Abrams.

Todd told the Justice in an email that some of the top priority issues faculty identified in the preliminary survey were salaries, job security and inclusion in curriculum development and University governance. Many of these are similar to issues identified by an ad hoc committee that investigated contract faculty in 2005, which issued a report stating contract faculty “are concerned not only with salary and benefits, but with academic freedom, job security, and opportunities for professional advancement.”

Additionally, faculty are calling for clearer standards as to how health insurance is distributed among adjunct faculty. While some departments and programs offer health insurance to adjuncts teaching two or more classes, this standard is not applied across the board, according to Todd. Part of the information SEIU is requesting from the University relates to how departments and programs determine health insurance policy.

The University’s website states that employees working half-time or more for at least one semester are eligible for the University’s benefits program “unless otherwise stated.” Executive Director for Integrated Media Bill Schaller wrote to the Justice in an email that the University's policy is “consistent” but that the number of courses necessary to reach half-time status varies among departments.

The outreach committee, another sub-committee of the contract action team, is responsible for getting more of the roughly 200 faculty represented by the union actively involved in its work. “I can say that at the last contract action team meeting, we had at least 10 people, so it’s probably 15 in total” who are heavily involved in the contract action team at present, Todd told the Justice. “What we aspire to is for really active members to be about a one to 10 ratio, so at least one person representing 10 members who is quite active.”

Currently, the contract action team includes representatives from the English, Anthropology, History and Fine Arts departments, as well as the Heller School for Social Policy and Management and the Rabb School of Continuing Studies. “We are now going to more actively outreach to the sciences and to the International Business School, since we would really like to have some representation on our contract action team from those places,” Todd said. To increase interest, the outreach committee is organizing several forums for bargaining unit members to discuss their concerns. While Abrams said that the contract action team has not yet determined whether these will be open to the public, Todd said that usually when unions form and host these types of forums, they are closed so that union members can feel comfortable discussing private concerns. She is a member of the faculty-staff union at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The information SEIU is requesting from the University, Abrams said, includes “name, role, title at the University, how long faculty members have worked at the University, what their official terms of their contracts are, in some cases — as I understand it, it might include requesting details of their job description, to really try to develop a very accurate picture of how the university employs faculty right now.”

Union requests for information are a standard part of labor negotiations and are often used so that unions can gather information to investigate grievances brought by bargaining unit members. In most cases, the National Labor Relations Board requires employers to comply with requests for information. Jason Stephany, a spokesman for SEIU Local 509, wrote to the Justice in an email that "Brandeis faculty look forward to receiving a response from university administrators in the coming weeks, as this data will help to inform colleagues and establish bargaining priorities."

Schaller wrote in his email that “The union sent an extensive list of information they requested. We are reviewing the requests and will do our best to respond in a timely manner.” He added that the University has been in contact with SEIU Local 509 since the faculty joined the union but that negotiations have not yet started.