Turning Challenges into Wins

Miami University faculty members and librarians celebrate the power of solidarity at the FAM Prom in spring 2023.

Summer 2024 marked the first anniversary of the certification of the Faculty Alliance of Miami (FAM) at Miami University in Ohio. Our union was the AAUP-AFT’s biggest higher education union win in the nation in 2023, organizing more than 830 faculty members and librarians in a state where legislators are currently trying—unsuccessfully—to destroy higher education collective bargaining rights. We secured certification of our union despite legislative challenges, a vicious union-busting effort by the university, and the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, which curtailed our ability to organize faculty members door-to-door. We won because our organizing efforts tapped into an anger and sense of unrest that were already present among faculty members and librarians at Miami, stemming especially from dismal pay and a lack of true shared governance. We saw the path forward, and it had to be through an organized, active faculty union.

After the confetti had settled from our postcertification celebrations, we got to work. In preparing to bargain our first contract, we drew on the lessons we had learned during the organizing and election phases, but we also had to learn new things. We spent the majority of the summer of 2023 analyzing the results of our bargaining survey; creating a bargaining platform; building our large, inclusive bargaining council and our negotiating team; researching other higher education contracts; and writing proposals. We worked in solidarity across units despite attempts to divide us—part of management’s union-busting effort was to split our unit into two, with one unit for faculty members and another for librarians—and we stuck to our values as a member-led, democratic, and radically inclusive union. We learned how to negotiate at the AAUP Summer Institute and the AFT Union Leadership Institute, and several members attended the online Organizing for Power bargaining training led by the late labor activist and author Jane McAlevey. Finally, in a room crowded with faculty members and librarians, we began negotiations with management on August 31, 2023. “It was a heady experience, being in that packed room on day one of bargaining,” says Rachel Makarowski, a key FAM organizer and a member of FAM’s communications and negotiating teams. “We were finally at the table. We finally had a voice in decision-making at this university.” 

Organizing Is Critical

We quickly realized that, despite being in a new, postelection negotiating phase, our organizing phase was not over—nor was management’s union-busting phase. Ongoing outreach and one-on-one conversations with fellow faculty members and librarians are at the heart of FAM’s values as a member-led union, and they are also crucial while negotiating a first contract. As a new union, we needed to educate our members about the bargaining process, assuage their concerns, and inoculate ourselves against attempts by the administration to undermine the union, such as denying planned 2023 raises to bargaining-unit members while granting them to other faculty members—and blaming FAM. (Management denied raises in the same manner in 2024.) Though management has tried to demoralize and grind down faculty and librarian support for our union, and used scare tactics to try to intimidate us, those actions are only making us stronger.

One of our first priorities at the table was to negotiate for open bargaining, a method championed by McAlevey that allows bargaining-unit members to attend negotiations. This approach builds solidarity, invites members to be educated and involved, and forces management to face the people affected by the language of the contract. Open bargaining is also an effective organizing tool, especially when management says outrageous things at the table. “We had management’s lawyers saying that artificial intelligence (AI) is a ‘future problem’ and their dismal compensation proposal is ‘objectively reasonable,’” lead negotiator Ginny Boehme says. “We’ve lost count of how many times they’ve used the phrase ‘at management’s sole discretion’ in ways that confound the fundamental meaning of shared governance and academic freedom. It’s important for our members to see and hear management shoring up their power, refusing to hold to their own policies, and dismissing faculty concerns at the table where we’re supposed to be working together.”

Ongoing organizing efforts also help to support turnout at contract actions, and we have had many successful actions in this first year. Nearly three hundred faculty members and librarians attended the faculty assembly we called in response to management’s suspension of a university-wide committee charged with evaluating administrators. More than a dozen faculty members and librarians spoke out about the obvious attempt to prevent administrators from receiving constructive feedback and to suspend shared governance. Five faculty members and a student leader from Students for FAM, our student ally group, spoke at the February 2024 board of trustees meeting. “Ignoring faculty input is shortsighted and counterproductive,” FAM organizer Kazue Harada declared at the meeting. “Work with us, not against us.” And Dylan Halpin, a Miami student and member of Students for FAM, pleaded to the board, “When a group of inspired, passionate professors bring their ideas to the table under the banner of FAM, of faculty unity, of positive change, the response by Miami’s administration seems at best adverse to this progress.” We turned out seventy-four faculty members and librarians at the budget presentation we arranged with the AAUP’s consultant, Howard Bunsis, and more than two hundred faculty members and librarians showed up for Miami’s official budget symposium, where we distributed a “FAM Index” fact-checking management’s misleading claims about Miami’s budget along with Miami-red buttons reading “7%”—our proposal’s average annual salary increment for both faculty members and librarians. 

Actions that put public pressure on management are only one aspect of organizing. One-on-one conversations remain central to our goal of being a member-led union, and weekly liaison meetings help FAM stay in close touch with member perspectives. Building community and being creative are important, too: In our first year, we organized numerous social events to uplift and activate our members, including a Solar Eclipse party with buttons reading, “You can’t eclipse us—we are the university!,” a first-FAM-iversary party celebrating our 2023 election wins, and postbargaining happy hours where members could debrief directly with our negotiating team. We also took the opportunity to build solidarity with students at our “Late Night Study Break” action during finals week, where we served coffee, provided breakfast, and handed out pro-union stickers to students studying for final exams. 

Countering the union-busting claims management is making at the negotiating table and in email updates has posed particular challenges and occasionally prompted faculty concerns about our progress in bargaining. Through a combination of one-on-one conversations with colleagues, communications and education, and social media content, we have been able to explain that FAM is not holding up raises for bargaining-unit members as management has claimed—on the contrary, in a memorandum of understanding passed across the bargaining table, we demanded the same raises that non-bargaining-unit members received—nor are we the party responsible for stopping the work of shared governance committees on campus, such as the Committee for the Evaluation of Administrators. Such clarification needs to be ongoing, not a one-time message but an argument reiterated throughout the negotiating process. “When faculty and librarians raise concerns, fears, and even critiques with us, that’s an organizing opportunity,” says lead FAM organizer and contract action team cochair Cathy Wagner. “We take the time to talk things over, share our short- and long-term goals and perspectives, and hopefully bring our colleagues more into the fold.” 

Finally, another aspect of ongoing organizing is building support and solidarity beyond FAM, with student and alumni allies, other Miami unions, and unions across the state and nation. Building regional and national power for higher education unions sometimes gets lost in the urgency and immediacy of negotiations, but it is vital, especially now in Ohio, where legislators have attempted (and failed!) to pass Senate Bill 83, nicknamed the Higher Education Destruction Act, which would give the state legislature control of university curricula, make syllabi and faculty contact information public, and outlaw crucial collective bargaining rights. As a new local that will not have an elected governance structure until we obtain our charter, we are careful to focus our political work on higher education and labor matters—issues central to our mission that we are certain our members support. FAM has been outspoken in our opposition to SB 83, we have successfully mobilized our members to call and write lawmakers, and we even organized a carpool so that our members could testify against the bill in Columbus. 

Winning on Artificial Intelligence

Sometimes, management fumbles and offers an opportunity for the union to claim victory on a subject the university initially rejected. This is what happened at Miami with AI, and, as a result, FAM is now one of the first higher education unions in the nation to address the impact of artificial intelligence on faculty work. 

We put forward a proposal on AI that management rejected in October 2023, saying that the technology was a “future problem” and not a mandatory subject of bargaining. The administration proceeded to form an AI Task Force and send out a survey asking faculty members and librarians how AI affects our teaching and research—clearly showing that AI is a current issue that bears directly on our working conditions. We sent a cease-and-desist letter and threatened to file an unfair labor practice, since management was trying to go around the bargaining process. Simultaneously, we threatened to go to the press with this issue, telling management that the university could either face negative publicity or be part of a shared win by negotiating one of the first contracts in higher education with provisions to address AI. This combined strategy pressured management to work with us on the issue, and we were able to sign a memorandum of understanding on AI that will lead to collaboration between FAM and management at labor-management meetings. Our memorandum of understanding could potentially make AI a mandatory subject of bargaining in future contracts. As the 2023 strikes by the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the Writer’s Guild of America dramatically proved, AI is bargainable and can and should be negotiated at the table. 

Fighting "Third-Partying"

A common union-busting tactic, and one that Miami management’s negotiating team used often, is calling our union (composed of more than 830 Miami faculty members and librarians) an “outside organization.” While we are an AAUP-AFT affiliate union, that does not mean that we are a third party; we are a member-led union advocating (and bargaining!) for ourselves and our colleagues. 

Management’s proposal on “Union Access to Information and Facilities,” a technical-sounding article without a snazzy name to captivate member attention, reflected this “third-partying.” While it may not sound compelling, this article was important, providing FAM with key information about our members, a role at new faculty orientation, and campus workspace. Management’s first few proposals described FAM’s access to campus workspaces as being “on the same terms, including all customary fees and charges, as other non-University groups.” We argued stridently that we were not a “non-University group.” At the table, we insisted that the university is us, and we are the university, doing the work of Miami’s central educational mission. After exchanging a number of versions of the article, we were able to come to a tentative agreement (TA) on language acknowledging that we are a university group. According to this TA, FAM has the same access to workspaces “on the same terms . . . as other non-student campus organizations.” FAM one, union-busting zero! 

Fixing Summer Pay Delays

In July 2024, we became aware of a new issue facing our members who were teaching summer courses: delays in payment and claims that the pay schedule had been changed. Because of a new human resources system, many faculty members teaching summer courses had no contracts for their summer teaching, an already-unnerving situation exacerbated by the threat of late payments (or, in some cases, actually late payments). 

FAM sprang into action, following a process designed to mobilize our collective power and to showcase what our union can do. First, we contacted our members teaching summer courses to investigate the scope of the issue and find out what problems they were facing. Second, we worked with management through our lawyers to try to resolve the issue before escalating our actions—all the while agitating for more membership and support through unit-wide email updates. We even prepared a damning press release, complete with quotations from members who had not been paid, to send out just in case we could not come to a resolution with management in a timely fashion. 

In the end, because of the pressure we were able to exert on management to do the right thing, our members (with two individual exceptions that we are investigating) were paid in full and on time, and we did not send out the press release. We were able to broadcast this material win to all of our members, illustrating the strength and power of a union in action to address issues collectively.

Union Like You Mean It

FAM’s communications team (affectionately called “commsrades”) has garnered national attention within the AFT and AAUP. With our mix of union education, faculty and librarian testimonials, witty Monday memes, and TikTok bargaining updates, we communicate with members through multiple modes and media, including local and national press, editorials and op-eds, emails to members, an informative and accessible website, striking graphics and videos, and four social media accounts (Facebook, X [formerly Twitter], Instagram, and TikTok). It’s important to have our messaging on multiple platforms and in multiple modes to reach all our members and allies, as well as the public. We are also sure to diversify the mood and look of our content—whether we are outraged, elated, determined, funny, or straightforward. We don’t always want to be one thing. 

During the negotiating phase, we share bargaining updates as soon as possible, often immediately after bargaining closes for the day. This ensures that our members can see our updates first, before management’s sometimes misleading summaries go out. We send email updates, post updates on the website, and send text messages about them (using the Hustle platform). “We have developed a template that we update throughout the bargaining day in real time,” says Makarowski. “Then, we take an hour or so after bargaining ends to polish the summary, send out the updates, and post to social media. There are a lot of steps, but it’s worth it.” 

In addition to sending bargaining updates, we tap into social media trends that work in our favor and gain us views, including through TikTok. We develop graphics that illustrate management’s union-busting tactics and how senior administrators’ and coaches’ salaries have skyrocketed compared to the faculty’s (from 2016 to 2023, full-time faculty salaries increased 14 percent while management salaries increased 42 percent). 

Speaking of pay, our website wizard—and web services librarian—Jerry Yarnetsky developed a series of online pay proposal calculators that show the real impact that FAM’s compensation proposal would have on our members’ lives and families. “It’s one thing to read our proposals in the abstract,” says Yarnetsky, “and another to put in your own specific salary and see the number that could result from our proposal. It changes minds.” (Yarnetsky is also the designer of our two proposal trackers, one for each unit, which allow members to read the language of our proposals in full at any time.) Communicating effectively with our members is central to everything we do. It’s union education, member activation, and solidarity building. 

Looking Ahead

As of this writing, we are still in negotiations for our first contract. We’ve been at it for almost a year now, and we are making steady progress and coming to key compromises with management. We hope to complete our first contract in the course of the 2024–25 academic year. 

But we still need to see movement on our members’ major priorities, including compensation; job protections for longer-term contract faculty (teaching, clinical professors, and lecturers) and librarians; and protections for academic freedom. We’re hopeful and determined. We’ve been strategizing how we might put even greater pressure on management this fall, especially around compensation (many members’ top priority, given that our salaries are lower than those of our peers and have not kept up with the cost of living). 

At the outset of bargaining, we didn’t anticipate how much dedicated effort putting a new contract in place would take, or how absurdly hard management would push back. Our bosses still hope FAM will go away, and they find endless ways to condescend to, trifle with, and try to disempower our new union. It’s frustrating, but so far, their efforts have made us stronger.

We also didn’t know how much we’d grow. Members who didn’t want to participate in organizing outreach now happily serve on our negotiating team, and colleagues who voted against unionizing have pitched in to draft proposals on issues they cared about. Suspicious colleagues have become committed FAMsters—not all, but more each month.

What we knew before, and know even better now, is that organizing never ends, because solidarity wins.

Theresa A. Kulbaga is professor of English at Miami University, where she also serves as chair of communications and as a lead negotiator for FAM.