Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Wright State University’s faculty union will decline an offer made by the administration this week to begin negotiating a new contract ahead of a strike planned for Tuesday.
“No, and the reason is obvious,” Kich said. “Our members didn’t vote to strike over the next contract.”
The union filed a complaint last week with the State Employment Relations Board accusing administrators of breaking collective bargaining rules by negotiating in public, telling the news media about their “last, best offer” before telling the union, and failing to give the union requested information that was needed to continue negotiations
Response from AAUP-WSU
The article headline is potentially misleading: we are striking over the imposed contract, and their response is to offer to begin negotiating the next contract. Yes, if we had the imposed contract as the new baseline from which negotiations would proceed, we would be eager to begin negotiating from that position of rigged advantage, too. “Negotiate” is coming close to having no meaning whatsoever.
The union has already begun scheduling picketers for a possible strike that could start at 8 a.m. Tuesday. Members plan to picket near the campus’s main entrances on Colonel Glenn Highway and near the Nutter Center.
Around 560 of Wright State’s 1,700 faculty are members of the AAUP-WSU, according to the university.
The administration’s offer to begin negotiating a “successor agreement” to the terms implemented earlier this month is a “show of good faith,” Larry Chan, vice president of WSU legal affairs said in an email to the union’s chief negotiator.
“If they want to talk about the successor agreement we can open that up if they remove their unfair labor practice… so that’s the offer on the table,” president Cheryl Schrader said.
