Ohio University's Faculty Senate proposed that the entire faculty organize into a collective bargaining unit to better negotiate with the administration regarding contracts.
Chemistry professor Ken Brown, who presented at last night's meeting, said the resolution to organize comes after the administration used private money from the faculty to subsidize health insurance costs.
OU began using about 10 percent of faculty members' salaries toward health insurance and then offsetting that with a 10 percent salary increase, said Joe Bernt, director of graduate studies in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. He could not specify when OU began subsidizing faculty healthcare costs with faculty salaries or when it stopped using the money for healthcare.
OU now has about a $1 to $1.5 million health care benefit surplus because the money stopped going toward health insurance costs and began being held for other purposes, Bernt said.
He did not comment specifically on what those other purposes are.
When I first came here
health care was absolutely free for employees in the '90s he said. Over the course of the '90s and this decade the university has been whittling away
whittling away
whittling away and saying they have to take the money from faculty G? in order to have health insurance.
He said OU President Roderick McDavis promised three years ago to return the money to faculty but that OU kept stealing that money and using it toward whatever purpose it saw necessary. Because the administration no longer uses the money toward health care benefits, the senate called for its return to faculty members.
Brown said he believes the administration's failure to redistribute the surplus to the faculty represents a lack of respect and a breach of the trust the faculty members had in handing over their money.
Joe McLaughlin, chairman of the senate's Finance and Facilities Committee, said he wasn't sure the resolution should only be attributed this one incident. Brown said this was just the straw that broke the camel's back
and Bernt agreed.
We can come up with lots and lots (of examples) to explain how this is just typical of a whole pattern of behaviors that necessitates this action
Bernt said.
The senate expressed its frustration and anger with the administration's general disregard for its opinions and concerns, citing how it only signed ' and thereby supported ' one of its 19 resolutions this year.
Even if you make an agreement with the administration
if they find it inconvenient
they can just dismiss it
Brown said.
He added that the senate should begin this summer by sending out e-mails to all faculty members, inviting them to join this collective bargaining unit. The senate will present a second reading of the resolution in September and then put it to a vote.
