Official Updates from USFFA

May 20, 2020
A message from President Sonja Poole

As of today, the University has not demonstrated that the conditions have been met to re-open our contract. However, we have initiated talks with the University to engage in contingency planning and discuss ways to meet USF’s immediate needs. 

In our initial conversations with the Administration that occurred on Monday, May 18, we were given five concepts that they would like to enact as soon as possible. These concepts need our approval and will be discussed, along with counter-concepts/proposals, in this week’s Policy Board meeting on May 20th at 3:30 pm. 

One of the concepts presented by the administration was to move the deadline for terminating probationary faculty and librarians from May 31 to November 1, 2020. Moving the deadline to November 1 allows the administration to know more about the complete financial impact of COVID-19 before engaging in actions that may be irreversible, such as layoffs. This is the first formal notification we received that they are considering layoffs within our bargaining unit. 

We have also been asked to spend the month of June developing contingency plans based upon different scenarios of budget shortfalls.  In short, the university administration is trying to give themselves as much flexibility as possible to meet the still uncertain financial challenges ahead. And we are trying to do our part in identifying solutions to the immediate crisis in ways that do not unduly harm people.

Tomorrow morning, we will be meeting with our USFFA colleagues who were nominated to serve on the Contingency Planning/Negotiation Team (CPT) and the Negotiating Advisory Team (NAT) to consider options in response to the Administration’s May 18 presentation. We will also discuss the Administration’s ideas at the Policy Board meeting, expanding on the CPT/NAT discussions.

Please join our Policy Board meeting to hear more about these discussions, participate in our deliberations and share your thoughts.  As always, we also encourage you to reach out to your Policy Board representatives with your priorities and ideas.