U-M Flint AFT-AAUP’s contract campaign is part of a movement for the public good

Last week, the University of Michigan-Flint American Federation of Teachers-American Association of University Professors began negotiating our first contract with the University of Michigan. We are a new union at the University of Michigan-Flint, just recognized this past April, and we represent tenured and tenure-track U-M Flint faculty. While a range of issues brought us together, our overarching concerns can be summarized as follows: We maintain that our labor has been undervalued. We further hold that, for the University to realize its mission to serve the public good, it must make a broad commitment to the U-M Flint campus that includes recognizing the value that our members bring to the institution and our community. We have thus developed the following campaign slogan: Value our labor, recognize our value.

We are not alone in such a vision. A growing movement among workers in higher education has called for a national renewal of the University’s public good mission. This movement understands higher education to be a good that benefits society, and not simply individuals, through developing an educated citizenry, providing access to employment and social mobility, and supporting research, the arts and economic prosperity for society at large. Most recently, 11 unions representing employees in higher education — including faculty, staff and hospital workers — issued a statement in support of such a vision. Co-signed by our own parent unions, the AFT and the AAUP, the statement calls for full public funding of comprehensive higher education, sustainable working conditions for all higher education employees and increased access to institutions of higher learning for the public. As the first tenure-track faculty union at the University, we vigorously endorse this vision and view higher education as a public good. 

What does this look like as we embark on our first contract campaign? Our membership works with some of the most promising students in the state, but many of these students struggle to pay tuition or find time to devote to school while working part-time or full-time jobs. Others face challenges related to family care or related responsibilities. Treating the University as a public good means supporting these students through generous financial aid and robust support services. Because our success in the classroom is intertwined with the success of our students, providing this kind of support to them is a way to value our labor. This is especially the case given that our primary role in the classroom is to enable our students to progress along paths of social mobility and engaged citizenship. 

Treating higher education as a public good also means supporting a wide range of opportunities for students across science and technology, liberal arts and professional programs. It means ensuring that our bargaining unit members have the funding and time they need to carry out their research and creative work, thus enabling them to better serve our students and community. It means compensating us fairly, even though our students generate fewer tuition dollars than students on other U-M campuses. And it means providing the institutional stability we need — after years of austerity and near-constant administrative upheaval — to support these students in their educational journeys.

Making U-M Flint into a public good also means cultivating a more democratic workplace. While organizing our union, our colleagues regularly noted that they perceived a steady decline in a once robust democratic culture that previously defined our campus and the University as a whole. Supporting greater administrative transparency, protecting academic freedom and increasing the quality of shared governance at the University are therefore among our top priorities as we prepare for further bargaining. Indeed, part of recognizing our value is heeding our voices as we work collaboratively to make our campus a space that serves our students and community. The public good mission described above is best served when our universities are bastions of democratic practice, thereby supporting the broader democratic fabric of our society.

Our commitment to a democratic workplace is a value we share with our union siblings across the University’s three campuses and Michigan Medicine. As we organized, we learned much from our fellow union workers and reaffirmed our understanding that demonstrating solidarity with each other is vital to the collective success of both the labor movement and the University. 

Indeed, three unions in Michigan Medicine — United Michigan Medicine Allied Professionals, United Physician Assistants of Michigan Medicine and SEIU Healthcare Michigan — are all currently involved in contract negotiations with the University. University Staff United, which represents U-M staff who carry out the essential work that allows our three campuses to thrive, is currently working towards recognition. We support these unions not solely because we are part of a shared labor movement, but also because we know that — for our university to achieve its highest ideals as a public good — everyone’s labor must be valued, everyone’s value must be recognized and everyone’s voice must be heard.  

In short, conceiving of our university as a public good trains our attention on how we value the contributions of all of those who work across the University. We advocate for this approach because we know that a more democratic university is one that is sustainable far into the future — a precious resource for which we are all responsible and in which we all have a stake.

Our campaign insists on investments in compensation and improved working conditions for our members. But beyond these fundamental issues, we want to be valued and for our students and community to be supported by a public institution. Leadership at the University has sometimes conceived of the U-M Flint and U-M Dearborn campuses as marginal to the University’s success. We ask the administration to reflect on what it would mean to consider our campus as central to what the University does best and to view our work as emblematic of public education’s unique promise. If we embrace higher education as a public good, the U-M Flint campus emerges as a vital part of that mission, reflecting a unique opportunity to make a lasting impact on our state and its people. In order to do this, however, the institution must value our labor, recognize our value and listen to our voices. We will be working tirelessly over the next few months to ensure that it does.

Daniel Birchok, president of UMF-AFT AAUP, and Chris Snider, vice president of UMF-AFT-AAUP, can be reached at dbirchok@umich.edu and cksnider@umich.edu.

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