The Voice

UUP members once again proved that there is strength in numbers—and that our strength doesn’t go unnoticed by state legislators.

We certainly flexed our collective muscle at our annual Legislative Information Day event, on Feb. 24 in the Well of the Legislative Office Building in Albany. More than 100 of you came to the capital to make UUP’s legislative priorities known to those who can make them reality.

Our members, some of who traveled hours by train, bus and car, made the most of their time in Albany. They met face-to-face with lawmakers from their districts and told them our concerns about proposed SUNY budget cuts. Legislators found members easily as the room was divided into seven geographic regions representing all 29 campuses.

By Frederick G Floss UUPActing President

Following six months of intense negotiations, UUP has reached a tentative agreement with the state on a new four-year contract. I thank our hard-working team of negotiators who have spent countless hours in these critical discussions. You will be seeing them soon as we visit your chapter to brief you on the contract early this semester.

By Frederick G. Floss, UUP Acting President ffloss@uupmail.org

First, let me wish you all the very best New Year and I hope you enjoyed a wonderful holiday season. It is this time of year that we come together as families and communities to help one another. The New Year very often also brings with it many changes.

For me, the New Year has brought new responsibilities. On Nov. 30, I accepted the Executive Board’s appointment as acting president of UUP. I am honored and humbled by the faith which the Executive Board has put in me with this appointment. After having Bill Scheuerman as president for the last 14 years, I realize it may take a little while to get used to seeing someone else taking the lead on behalf of all of you.

Let me review the next steps in the process for this transition, to give you a better understanding of what will be happening at UUP.

I leave UUP to assume the presidency of the National Labor College with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I’m excited about the role I’ll play in helping to revitalize the American labor movement. The National Labor College is a key institution in providing organized labor with the tools it needs for the 21st century. I look forward to this challenge.

On the other, working with the UUP these last 20 years has meant more to me than I can ever say. I was proud to serve as chief negotiator, then vice president, and I’ve loved every minute of my presidency at UUP.

The mission of the State University of New York is to provide high-quality, affordable, accessible higher education for all of New York’s citizens. Through the years, SUNY did a pretty good job in recruiting a diverse student body.

To cite one example, when faculty and administrators at SUNY’s College of Agriculture and Technology at Morrisville confronted declining enrollment numbers a few years ago, they decided to recruit more students from urban centers across New York state in order to maintain enrollment. The result is that now nearly 40 percent of Morrisville’s students are people of color, and the campus has attracted attention because of its proactive recruitment policies. And this year, SUNY has launched a systematic plan to recruit and engage historically underrepresented students and faculty on all campuses.

Why is this important? First, historically underrepresented students constitute a large and growing pool of potential SUNY applicants. Higher education analysts project that the population of Hispanic and other underrepresented students eligible to participate in public higher education will increase sharply over the next decade. By the year 2015, census and other data suggests that the majority of New York high school graduates will be from groups that have been historically underrepresented in SUNY.

Second, these demographic shifts, coupled with the need for an increasingly competitive workforce in New York, present public higher education policymakers with a challenge: to reduce educational inequities faced by underrepresented students while simultaneously maintaining the highest educational standards.

Score another victory for UUP! Score two! And we’re going for three! 

I want you to know your union works hard for you every day. And we get results. Just look at what we’ve accomplished over the last few months.

First, Gov. Spitzer’s budget for SUNY included the legislative add-ons from the previous years. With additional legislative add-ons, SUNY received an increase of about $160 million for the current fiscal year. This is certainly a major step in the right direction. We thank legislative leaders and the governor for their commitment to UUP and SUNY.

Second, UUP played the instrumental role in getting pension equity for our members. The Legislature passed the ORP pension equity bill and, better yet, the governor signed the bill into law. This means that thousands of UUPers will receive a raise in take-home pay of 3 percent over the next three years. It took several years, but UUPers now have pension equity! This was an amazing victory. Most states and private companies are attacking employee pensions. In the recent New York gubernatorial campaign, one candidate even proposed doing away with pensions for public employees. We were swimming against the current of popular ideology on this issue, but miraculously we won. Our thanks go to legislative leaders in both houses and to the governor.

Third, the Berger Commission tried to remove Upstate Medical University (UMU) from SUNY. To prevent this, UUP filed a lawsuit and supplemented our legal work with a series of meetings with leaders in the governor’s office. The plan to privatize UMU was one of the toughest challenges UUP faced during my tenure as president. I have to admit, for a while things looked grim, but our legal case and our ability to work with the governor’s people eventually worked. UMU and Crouse Hospital in Syracuse reached an affiliation agreement and it appears that UMU is safe again. This was another major victory for UUP and SUNY.

Another Labor Day has come and gone and it is apparent that unions are losing their grip on the holiday. Sure, you’ll find an occasional parade or picnic celebrating organized labor’s glorious history, but Labor Day 2007 looked a little different from those of just two or three decades ago. The number of parades and picnics has dwindled, as has the number of celebrants. That’s because the labor movement has taken it on the chin. Unions are no longer needed, the conventional wisdom goes, and labor’s demise is just reward for its interference with the marketplace. In this view, it’s not a bad thing that only about 7 percent of private sector workers are in unions.

There are many reasons for the decline of organized labor. The near monopolistic practices of organized heavy industries, such as steel and auto, to name two of the most obvious, made foreign imports more attractive than American-made goods. Follow-the-leader pricing, planned scarcity and the unwillingness of the corporate sector to disrupt controlled markets by updating production facilities contributed to the decline of heavy industry in the U.S. The last few decades, hundreds of thousands of union workers in heavy industry lost their jobs to foreign producers that rely on modern technology, just-in-time production practices, and the “subsidy” of national health insurance. Worse, the intractability of U.S. corporations is only likely to exacerbate the problem. Consider, for example, gas prices at $3 a gallon, but American car makers are still betting their future on the sale of SUV-style crossovers and bragging about cars that get 28 miles per gallon. Is it any wonder that Toyota is outstripping General Motors in the American market?