The labor management meeting began with the union expressing concerns about attendance policies for open meetings, specifically the Governing Council. We pointed to Governor Hochol’s memo interpreting the Open Meetings Act to allow remote attendance in cases of illness and caretaking emergencies. SPH policies contradict this memo, as well as model the wrong behavior for a public health school. The labor designee (management’s lawyer) responded that this is not unique to SPH. SPH would have to amend its governing plan, but management said it was unlikely the Board of Trustees would approve it. They pointed to ADA accommodations and said this was not a contractual issue. Some SPH faculty are interested in working on a change in the governance plan to allow for hybrid attendance.

The next item on the agenda was seeking clarification on course caps and minimums, including for online courses, enrollment required to not cancel a course or start a new section, and course size and TA assignment. We are concerned about the workload issues current practices create, and the harm to students who sign up for a reasonably sized class to find out they are in a class twice the size. Classes are being combined at the last minute, leaving no time for instructors to adjust plans, and the students are complaining. Courses need to be redesigned if they are so much larger than when they were first developed.  Management attempted to minimize the problem by saying there are very few cases of classes over 40, and that they need to use actual “realistic” evidence before discussing. They also reminded us that there are no course caps in the contract. We emphasized that course sizes are set through faculty governance and State Ed, and that other schools have policies about jumbo classes and cap writing intensive courses at 25. Management said they will look into it. We emphasized that there needs to be a transparent policy for when TAs are assigned. In the end, we agreed that management would provide us with the information we requested within 2 weeks.

The ongoing problems of understaffing and overwork was the next item we took up, emphasizing that we plan to address it in more detail in future meetings. SPH staff are asked to do more work – and different work than they got hired to do. Staff end up working on vacation or while sick because the workload is so heavy. This also affects faculty, who take on some staff workload. Management, as they usually do on this topic, wanted specific individual cases, which we do not present to protect coworkers from retaliation. One of the senior associate deans said that the number of staff has doubled since 2016, when SPH became a school, and that there are new departments with new functions. We asked to know about vacancies being unfilled and were told that there are delays that are out of management’s control but there is currently only one open HEO position and one faculty search. When we brought up staff turnover, management said they were unfamiliar with any benchmarks of what constitutes high turnover. This is a serious workplace issue that we need to organize around, as well as bring up in future meetings.

The last agenda item had to do with intellectual property and asynchronous classes. There are instances of SPH instructors using course shells in Blackboard developed by other instructors without compensation for those who developed the courses, or even permission. Interestingly, management said there was not a static policy, that it depends on the needs of the school. SPH had offered faculty a free, voluntary training to develop online courses, with the school retaining intellectual property rights. (Management insisted that the training was free for faculty, seemingly unaware that faculty at other schools were paid to participate in such trainings.) In any case, that original agreement is not applicable now. We pressed to know the policies in place now, and again were told that there is no policy, and that it should be discussed in the Governing Council. We countered this deflection by reminding management that intellectual property is in our contract and that faculty retain the rights to courses they develop even if there is a stipend to develop them except when they voluntarily sign away their rights. The default is for faculty to retain intellectual property rights. This was a productive moment of emphasis on our part because management said they had zero disagreement with the default being that faculty retain rights. One of the reasons we do labor management meetings is to get things like this on record.