After two years of negotiations, non-tenured faculty at Skidmore College have reached a tentative contract agreement with the private college in Saratoga Springs.
Nearly 200 non-tenure-track faculty, including artists-in-residence, librarians, and some music instructors, voted to unionize with SEIU Local200United in September of 2022. More than 40 bargaining sessions have been held since, with representatives of the college and the union finally reaching a tentative collective bargaining agreement Tuesday.
The fine print of the CBA has not been released. Union members first need to approve it, likely in March.
SEIU representative Sean Collins says while the CBA doesn’t meet all of the union’s demands, there's still plenty worth celebrating.
“Now as a result of this agreement, faculty at Skidmore who in many instances, have taught at the college for years, if not decades, will no longer what we refer to as ‘serial terminal contracts or appointments,’ on a year-to-year, every couple of years, potentially subject to non-renewal. Now, they will be provided renewable contracts which come with enhances job security, just cause protections,” said Collins.
The agreement will limit the college’s use of short-term contracts to situations like filling a professor’s sabbatical.
Collins says another big win is paid parental leave.
“It provides 12 weeks of, or, rather, a semester of fully paid parental leave so new parents can bond with their newborn child or newly adopted child. I mean these are gains that not only will affect our members but we hope will be extended to the rest of the faculty, the tenured and tenure-track faculty and staff,” said Collins.
Skidmore Faculty Forward organizing committee member and English Professor Ruth McAdams has been on short-term contracts since she began teaching at the school in 2017. Now, she and other union members will be transitioned to renewable contracts that come with a three-tiered promotional system.
She’s also celebrating a standardized evaluation process for non-tenure-track faculty in the CBA.
“Prior to now, Skidmore has had no uniform system for evaluating the performance of NTT faculty. Some sub-categories of NTT faculty were being regularly evaluated, but many of us were not. Not being evaluated, it may sound good, but it, in fact, leaves you incredibly vulnerable because no one is actually documenting that you’re doing a great job,” said McAdams.
The negotiation process was not always easy — union members called a number of rallies when they felt college representatives were dragging their feet and both parties filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.
McAdams says now that an agreement has been reached, she’s hopeful to leave the frustrations of negotiating in the past.
“So, the future will involve working together with the administration to ensure that the contract that we’ve negotiated is upheld and enforced. So, it is a collaborative process, but it is also one of mutual monitoring and checks and balances. So, we are eager to see the contract that we all have worked so hard on be the reality,” said McAdams.
In response to the news, the college says it’s glad to have been able to reach the agreement, thanking both the union and college’s negotiating committees for their work toward the contract and maintaining a “collective interest in supporting all members” of their community.
If the union members approve the contract, it’ll be retroactive to June 2024 and will expire at the end of May 2027.
