Arbitration is Finally Done

Here's the link to the arbitration award. Financially we got a reasonable settlement. From the workload we got exactly what we expected -- another "equivalent to Teplitski" award which now sets up a task force to study the issues.

In addition,(besides the $$$ and the fact that the annual increases will be effective on September 1 of each year and not "staged in" as 1% at Sept. 1.5% in Jan. etc. as per the last contract), there is a new step added to the contract effective next September. I can hardly wait to hear our "formal" management's response, given that we heard that if we got the kind of financial settlement we had asked for that there would be a number of people in the support staff out of a job. I will check with my "sources" to see what I can find out, but, as I have previously posted, I am sure that this was just an ill-thought-out angry comment kited out by management as a way to drive a wedge between faculty and support staff (which was a massive failure, by the way, as all it did was make the support staff more recognisant than ever of the lack of management sensitivity to ALL employee concerns). In addition we all got one more hour for out-of-class contact with students: our college already had a local agreement for this, and it is badly needed given the additional demands on our out-of-class time over the last several years thanks to email and so on.

I will be interested to hear the comments of other faculty on the results.