SIUC faculty union members will hit the picket lines in front of SIUC’s top administrative building to bolster awareness of their cause, disseminate information, and call on administrators to meet more often and for longer periods of time in contract negotiations.

Faculty association members will congregate outside of Anthony Hall Monday from 10 a.m. until noon.

The whole reason for the picketing is to tell the administration:Stop stalling. Contract now,’ faculty union president Jim Sullivan said.

Advertisement

The faculty have said since January that they wanted a contract by March. Earlier this month faculty voted on measures to support faculty union negotiators in ongoing negotiations. The picketing is the first such measure and other measures include distributing bright yellow bumper stickers declaring, CONTRACT NOW.

A press release from Sullivan states the picketing will mark the one-year anniversary of the start of contract negotiations. Walter Jaehnig, faculty association media coordinator, said the picketing movement will allow faculty to express their frustration and happiness with the slow pace of negotiations.

He stressed that this protest is an informational picketing.

This is not intended at all to disrupt any University activity, Jaehnig said. We will not block the entryways and exits or call out names to administrators as they go by.

Margaret Winters, associate vice chancellor for Academic Affairs and spokeswoman for the administration, said the association’s plan to picket is legal under the employee’s handbook.

The union is well within its rights, she said.

It’s obviously a form of influencing peoples’ opinions but obviously the real negotiations will be done at the table. The people who will be influenced will not be so much the bargaining team, but those people who otherwise would not pay attention to what the union has been claiming.

Advertisement*

Jaehnig would not estimate how many faculty would attend because foremost faculty members must attend to their professional duties such as teaching classes and maintaining office hours.

Sullivan said picketing will help the union enlist the assistance of other faculty who will in turn help the union make the administration’s negotiating team meet more often for longer blocks of time.

We have been negotiating for a year now, and we are not even close to a proposal we can bring before the faculty, he said.

Winters said she still could not see an end in sight to negotiations.

But it’s unfair to call this an anniversary, she said. We were sidetracked for months by the interim agreement, which then failed, and the fact that we had to spend so much time working through their 92-page document.

So yes, a calendar year has passed, but a lot has happened in that year.