Bowling Green State University and the BGSU Faculty Association-AAUP have completed negotiations on a new three-year contract.
The agreement was announced today (4-1-19) in a joint statement issued by BGSU President Rodney Rogers ad BGSU-FA President David Jackson. The agreement must still be ratified by union members. The details of the contract will be circulated to faculty on Tuesday.
If ratified, the agreement will be submitted to the university’s trustees for their review and approval at the May 3 meeting.
According to the joint statement: “The proposed contract shows the commitment of the parties to empower and support faculty to achieve excellence, a key strategic objective of the University’s Strategic Plan. Both teams worked collaboratively and in good faith over the past year to achieve this goal. We continued to use the Interest-Based Bargaining approach, which allowed us to work in a collegial fashion to find creative consensus solutions that addressed the issues each party hoped to address.”
This is the third contract since the faculty voted to unionize in fall 2010. The first contract took three years of often contentious negotiations to reach. The relations between the administration and the union have been more amicable since then.
The full statement is below.
April 1, 2019
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to share that the University and the BGSU Faculty Association-AAUP have completed negotiations on our third collective bargaining agreement which, when ratified by the BGSU-FA members and the BGSU Board of Trustees, will cover July 1, 2019, through June 30, 2022.
As shared in previous joint communications on the bargaining process, and demonstrated by the agreements reached in our previous two contracts, both the University and BGSU-FA are committed to producing a fair contract that supports the broader mission of excellence in teaching/librarian effectiveness, scholarly/creative activities and service at BGSU. The proposed contract shows the commitment of the parties to empower and support faculty to achieve excellence, a key strategic objective of the University’s Strategic Plan. Both teams worked collaboratively and in good faith over the past year to achieve this goal. We continued to use the Interest-Based Bargaining approach, which allowed us to work in a collegial fashion to find creative consensus solutions that addressed the issues each party hoped to address.
The proposed 2019-2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement between Bowling Green State University and the BGSU-FA will be distributed shortly. The timeline for both parties is to conduct the ratification vote by BGSU-FA members April 16-19; assuming ratification, the Collective Bargaining Agreement would be submitted to the BGSU Board of Trustees for its review and approval at the May 3, 2019, meeting.
We extend our thanks to members of both bargaining teams for their hard work over the past year to bring us this proposed contract that we both believe will continue the strong relations between the University and the BGSU-FA to support the success of BGSU now and in the future.
Regards,
Rodney K. Rogers, Ph.D.
President
David J. Jackson, Ph.D.
BGSU-FA President
