At the Executive Board’s meeting last month, Frank Frisenda made a very important point: The Board of Trustees’ most recent and most brazen attack on our contract might be disturbing, but it is not a reason to be afraid. It is a reason to get boiling mad. To put it simply, they have declared war. How else, after eighteen months of negotiation, are we to interpret the fact that they explicitly called for cuts to full-time faculty that would effectively bust this union?
Simply getting angry, though, is not enough. We need to harness that anger. Or, more accurately, we need to keep harnessing that anger. We’ve been under attack in so many ways for so long now that it’s easy to forget how many battles we’ve won over the last two years and, more importantly, that we won them because we got angry, spoke up for ourselves, took action when necessary and refused to back down. Here’s a list for you to consider:
- We forced the administration to back off the “free speech zones” they tried to pen us in when people started protesting in summer 2011;
- We forced the administration to lift the moratorium on allncc;
- We won parity in health insurance and salaries for the LINCC lecturers
- We forced the administration to back off a potentially disastrous (for us) internal program review
- We held the line on, though we could not get fully restored, Academic Senate-related reassigned time
- We won a PERB ruling in our favor on the question of fourth-to-fifth semester temporary-to-probationary conversions for full time faculty
These are substantial victories, and it doesn’t matter whether they were won in negotiations, at a Board of Trustees meeting or in a hearing room. We won them because, no matter how the administration and Board of Trustees tried to undermine who we are and what we do, we kept showing up, and we kept showing, and we refused to let them get away with it. This time is no different. Tomorrow’s Board of Trustees meeting will be our first on-the-record opportunity to let them know that we intend to keep showing up as many times as we have to. We look forward to seeing you there.
When: Wednesday, October 10 (public session at approximately 8 PM)
Where: Tower, 11th Floor
To Speak: Contact Anne Brandi, x-7206