Posted at 10:20 p.m.; updated at 11:30 p.m.
UH strike over; classes reopen Thursday
Advertiser Staff
The nine-day University of Hawai'i faculty strike is over and all classes will resume Thursday, Gov. Ben Cayetano and faculty union leaders announced tonight.
Cayetano and UH Professional Assembly President Alexander Malahoff announced at 10 p.m. that a tentative contract agreement has been reached.
Cayetano said it is a two-year contract.
Malahoff said there will be no picketing Wednesday and that all classes will resume Thursday.
Malahoff said there will be across-the-board raises. He said increases would be 4 percent in the first year and 6 percent in the second year. He also said there will be a 2 percent merit raise.
Malahoff called it "a very fair settlement that takes care of all our diverse faculty and their needs." He said the new contract "will help our junior faculty at higher rates than in the past and maintain our stars in the university."
Cayetano called it "a win for the faculty and the university."
The agreement is subject to ratification by the faculty union.
UHPA, which represents about 3,200 professors, has been on strike since April 5. The strike affected 4,500 UH students.
Cayetano and the others announced the settlement tonight in the governor's office at the State Capitol.
After a marathon session that started at 9:30 a.m., members of the UHPA bargaining team spent the early evening calling their 24-member executive board to tell them about negotiations and arrange a late conference call among the board to ask for a voice vote on the potential contract.
The two sides have been working with a federal mediator, who shuttled back and forth between conference rooms with various offers and counterproposals.
University officials prepared to try to contact their 45,000 students as soon after the agreement was announced. Even if school resumes today, students — at least at the MÅnoa campus — will have to attend Saturday and Sunday classes every week to make the May 13 commencement date.
Administration officials have not yet released a calendar of weekend classes, but are finalizing one.
A meeting yesterday morning between Cayetano, Malahoff, UHPA associate executive director John Radcliffe, U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, state chief negotiator Davis Yogi and state budget director Neal Miyahira was the first sign a settlement was imminent.
Afterward, Cayetano said the group had reached an agreement and if they could convince other UHPA officials, the strike would be over. “They put some stuff on the board, we put some stuff on the board, tweak something here and a little there, and I said take it back to your people,” Cayetano said. “I feel pretty good about what happened. It’s the first time I’ve felt good about the talks.”
UHPA executive director J.N. Musto has said UHPA would not settle unless the state offers raises to the lecturers, and Cayetano said there was progress on that front. “There was movement on both sides. We addressed some of the concerns they had about the lecturers, who incidentally are some of the highest paid in the nation,” Cayetano said.
The agreement sends faculty members and students back to campus in a scramble to finish the semester on time and bring an end to the what is regarded as the most tumultuous and difficult semester the troubled university has endured.
Faculty union members demanding better wages and working conditions hit the picket lines April 5 for only the second time in the history of the statewide system. UHPA members last struck Nov. 21-22, 1983. But that strike was a weak signal in comparison to this one. Then, the union announced the two-day strike would be a show of force to make a point to the state that the faculty were serious about wanting a better contract. About 30 percent of the faculty members crossed the picket lines.
This time, participation remained at 86 percent systemwide even as of today. At the community colleges, participation was so high that those campuses remained virtually closed and even some non-UHPA faculty members refused to teach their classes.
The walkout coincided with the strike by Hawai‘i’s 13,000 public school teachers, marking the first time in U.S. history that labor unions have virtually shut down an entire state system of public education.
Weekend classes are necessary because if the Manoa campus cannot complete 15 weeks of instruction, it will have to explain why to the accrediting agency that issued a blistering report against the campus in 1999. The strike started during the 12th week of school and eight days of instruction have been lost.
The Western Association of Schools and Colleges sets the standard for a college semester at 15 weeks. Although it’s not a hard and fast rule, if UH deviates far from those norms, it must provide an explanation.
An accrediting team from the association last visited the campus in 1999 and renewed the school’s accreditation, but blasted its communications, planning, administration and governance. Association officials plan a return to MÅnoa next spring and have been in touch with administrators regarding the strike.
The faculty strike also represents the the latest blow for the struggling university system, which was hit hard by the state’s financial crisis of the mid-1990s. Prominent faculty members have been recruited by other universities, the 10-campus system faces a maintenance backlog of nearly $170 million, and faculty morale has plummeted.
Full-time UH faculty members earn from $30,000 to $147,000, although most fall toward the bottom of that scale. And most Hawai‘i faculty members earn, in general, less than their colleagues nationwide.
The university kept dorms, cafeterias, libraries and other buildings operating during the strike, but the degree of disruption to coursework and research projects remains unclear at this point. Some programs across the system were hit harder by the strike than others.
Students in the vocational and technical programs at the community colleges, who often have several hours of class time daily, have already felt adverse effects. Programs that train students for cosmetology, airplane maintenance, auto mechanics and other trades require hundreds of hours over the course of a year before students can take licensing exams in those areas.
Several faculty members at Honolulu Community College have expressed doubts that their students would be able to accumulate enough hours by May to take the their licensing exams.
Nursing and dental hygiene students also may have already suffered from the strike because they missed nearly two weeks of clinical classes. All of their professors have been on strike, and just yesterday, the Hawai‘i Labor Relations Board agreed to declare 19 nursing faculty members as essential workers.
“I don’t know if they’re going to graduate, but I know they’ll be back in clinical,” said Rosanne Harrigan, dean of the School of Nursing and Dental Hygiene.
Advertiser Staff Writer Kevin Dayton contributed to this report.
