This Committee provides advice on all matters related to promoting membership engagement with and participation in UTFA.
Alongside its annual business, the Membership Committee has been busy on three main concerns this year: Fair Pay for Newly Hired Colleagues, the New Member Luncheon, and Mobilization and Organization.
Fair Pay for Newly Hired Colleagues
As discussed in the report of Jun Nogami, UTFA’s Vice President, Salary, Benefits, Pension, and Workload, recent salary awards unfairly excluded many newly hired members. Several junior faculty members initiated a Fair Pay Petition to call on the Administration to reverse its position. UTFA’s leadership team pursued legal avenues, while the Membership Committee supported the mobilization efforts. The Membership Committee assisted in the call for signatures on the petition as well as the organization and recruitment for an UTFA membership town hall. We conducted door knocking sessions as well as one-on-ones to gather support. Though the Administration did not see fit to be fair to the newly hired colleagues, the Membership Committee, in conjunction with the petition organizers, continues to build a larger network of support around this and associated issues.
New Member Luncheon
In addition to mobilization and member initiative support, the Membership Committee has discussed the need to create a space for connection-building and to welcome junior members to the U of T community and to UTFA. To these ends, the Membership Committee has planned two social gatherings for "new" (anyone hired in the previous 5 years) faculty and librarians. These sessions will be held at the UTFA office in early October of the upcoming academic year. Though primarily planned to be a social first connection with UTFA, we also plan to highlight some resources and information relevant to newer members of the association.
Mobilization and Organization
Within the Membership Committee, a sub-committee has taken on more directly the task of organizing and mobilizing the membership around a range of unfair decisions and actions by the Administration including: the Administration's increasingly unwillingness to provide fair compensation and benefits; the increasingly unilateral way decisions that affect our working conditions are imposed without consultation or care (e.g., the graduate funding changes, the new budget model in FAS, downloading of work associated with changes to accommodations for students); lack of support around immigration for hired faculty and librarians; the rapid growth of administrators and consultants across the upper administration. The subcommittee is actively recruiting faculty with interest in any of these (or other) specific issues or interest in how the association can use the power of members to resist encroaching administrative reach and authoritarianism. Please contact the UTFA membership chair if you would like to participate: dancer@utfa.org.
I would like to thank the members of the Membership Committee for their work this year towards increasing participation and engagement at UTFA.
Thom Dancer
Chair, Membership Committee