Dear Colleagues,

With a new academic year, we bring you our first issue of Nuts & Bolts, our weekly roundup of FSU news. This issue focuses on contract bargaining. Our current contract expires on June 30, 2027, which means that this fall we will soon assemble our Core Bargaining Team to negotiate our successor contract (2027-2030). We expect to begin negotiations with the Administration in early spring.

We are looking for members who are interested in joining the team. Serving on the Core Bargaining Team is important, meaningful work in which you play a pivotal role in improving the working conditions for faculty and librarians on campus. Please complete the attached application and email it to fsu@umb.edu by September 28, 5PM. CBT members typically receive a course load reduction (CLR) or stipend for each academic semester in which collective bargaining occurs, as stipulated in Article 5.6 of our contract. Furthermore, serving on the bargaining team counts as university service on your AFR/ALR.

More details about the bargaining process are below. Please reach out to us at fsu@umb.edu with any questions.

Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA)

The Collective Bargaining Agreement (or “contract”) codifies all working conditions, inclusive of salaries and raises, for all faculty members and librarians at UMass Boston (except for those who hold administrative positions or are department chairs). The contract applies to everyone in the FSU bargaining unit whether they have joined the union or not, though only dues-paying union members can vote to ratify the contract. The contracts are legally binding agreements that are first negotiated by the Core Bargaining Team and the Administration and then ratified by FSU members.

Core Bargaining Team (CBT)  

The Core Bargaining Team is the sole group that represents FSU and negotiates the details and language of each new contract with the Administration. The constitution of the team should allow for proper representation of tenure stream and non-tenure track faculty members, including librarians. CBT members attend bargaining sessions and must be available to meet as a team between bargaining sessions.

Bargaining Priorities

The FSU will conduct a member survey prior to the start of bargaining to help us determine our priorities and proposals.  In addition to the survey, FSU maintains a running list of issues with and questions about contract language that require clarification. We also conduct meetings with constituent groups to learn about what is important to them that we could work on through the bargaining process.

The Bargaining Process

The CBT and the Administration’s bargaining team meet regularly throughout the duration of the bargaining process. During each session, the teams present proposals and discussion ensues. Counterproposals are often made, usually at the next session. Although we expect to begin contract negotiations in spring 2027, the process usually takes about a year until we have a contract ratified, although it varies. Typical bargaining sessions last 2 hours and are usually scheduled biweekly, with some exceptions.

 

This issue of The Point was written by Jason Rodriquez, FSU President and Professor of Sociology, and Jessica Holden, FSU Vice President and Associate University Archivist for Research Services.

In February 2025, the Carnegie Foundation classified UMass Boston as an R1, top-tier national research university, and moreover, as the top R1 university in the United States for its high research access to students across socioeconomic categories. This achievement is a great credit to our dedicated faculty and librarians, who put in the effort to make UMB all it can be and to take every opportunity to involve students along the way. It’s actually remarkable that we have done this, considering the substandard learning infrastructure on campus. By way of example, we want to draw your attention to the intellectual heart of UMB: Healey Library. The library should be a beautiful, modern, and comfortable space for intellectual engagement. But right now, it’s a health and safety hazard that is completely unacceptable by any standard, R1 or not. Consider the following:

1) Elevators. All four elevators in the library, which are original to the 50-year-old building, malfunction on a regular basis. Since just this past January, there have been nearly 30 documented incidents of the elevators failing or working incorrectly, with many of those incidents involving entrapments. That’s about once a week. The elevators pose an immediate danger to the health and safety of the FSU librarians and PSU and CSU staff who work in the building, as well as students, faculty, and members of the public who use the space. While many people are now opting to use the stairs, many others do not have that option, whether due to health conditions, disabilities, or the nature of their jobs—e.g., needing to transport book carts between floors. Some who have been trapped in the elevators have had panic attacks; others have waited more than an hour to be released from the entrapments. Anyone who has taught in the lower level of the library knows that due to the elevators, students are regularly late to class through no fault of their own. The highest levels of the Administration promised in 2023 to fix these broken elevators, and yet here we are. They urgently need to be replaced.

2) HVAC. Like the elevators, the HVAC system is ancient and failing. Ventilation is poor in many areas. Librarian and staff office temperatures are frequently in the high 70s/low 80s, sometimes so warm that people feel ill. The humidity is also far too high in most spaces, which poses a serious risk to the library’s circulating books collection and to our unique and irreplaceable archives and special collections. The faulty HVAC system endangers the human beings and physical library materials in the building, and yet the Administration has not yet acted on the need for a new system.

3) Pests. While pests of various types have been sighted throughout the building over recent years, insects are currently the most common. Library employees have routinely reported cockroaches on various floors, as well as the presence of clothes moths and carpet beetles in one archival storage area. These infestations limit the ability of our librarians, archivists, and staff to support our students and faculty. In the storage area with moths and carpet beetles, for example, the carpet will need to be removed and replaced—a project that the Administration has been promising to start for more than a year. Yet our understanding is that different Admin units are fighting over who will have to pay for it. Earth to Admin: all the money is coming from the same place—just get it done.

Our Administration, to its credit, has in recent years taken on big projects. They’ve built new dorms, reorganized the colleges to be more financially stable and intuitive, redone the entire UMB website, and made a nice green quad. While each project was messy, hard to do, and had its critics, each also, in the end, resulted in a better university. Which begs the question: amid all these much-needed improvements to our campus, when will the Administration invest in Healey Library and why have they not done so already? Safe working conditions are a contractual right (see Article 19.1 of the FSU contract) and a moral responsibility. Of course, if the Administration made all these much-needed repairs, we would merely have a safe, functioning workspace, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for anything resembling an R1-quality library.

While Healey Library has not been a priority for the Administration, it is a priority for us. We are coordinating on this with student leaders in Undergraduate Student Government, Faculty Council, as well as our friends in the CSU, PSU, and GEO. We call on the Administration to renovate our library. It is filled with dedicated educators, staff, and learners who make Healey Library the academic engine of the campus. Let’s honor that. Let’s make the library beautiful. But first: let’s make it safe, and let’s do that without delay.

Stay tuned this semester for updates on FSU’s support of Healey Library.

The committee for this year’s The Point currently includes Jessica Holden, Healey Library; Nick Juravich, History; Jeff Melnick, American Studies; and Steve Striffler, Labor Studies. If you want to write an edition of The Point, or if you just have an idea, please write us at fsu@umb.edu.

 

 

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to the new academic year! We especially want to welcome to campus our new faculty and librarians – we hope you find UMass Boston to be a professionally and personally rewarding place to work. Congratulations as well to all our faculty and librarians who were recently promoted. Those are effective on September 1 and include a salary increase as part of our collective bargaining agreement.

We have a new leadership team in place. Jason Rodriquez, Professor of Sociology, is the new President, having most recently served as the Vice President. Jessica Holden, Associate University Archivist for Research Services in Healey Library is the new Vice President, having most recently served on the previous bargaining team. We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to our past FSU President, Caroline Coscia, who served admirably in that role for the previous four years. Thank you, Caroline, for all you have done to improve campus life for faculty and librarians. We also have some new members on our Executive Committee and a committed group of volunteer-activists who do important work that strengthens our union. We are thrilled to be working with you and for you.

The FSU Executive Committee meets every two weeks over the semester. In these meetings we conduct routine business to keep the organization running as well as engage in broader discussions about building union power and improving the working conditions for employees on campus. Dues-paying members are welcome to join. The meetings will take place on Sep 15, Sep 29, Oct 13, Oct 27, Nov 10, Nov 24, and Dec 8 from 2-3:30.

This is going to be a big year for the FSU – we will begin bargaining for our 2027-2030 successor contract. Be on the lookout this fall because we will put out a call for bargaining team members and soon afterwards release a survey to faculty and librarians to determine what our priorities will be during negotiations with the administration. Stay tuned, too, for information about various social events that we are planning for this semester. Our union is here to support you, so please reach out to us anytime at fsu@umb.edu. No issue is too small!

Once again, welcome to the new year. We look forward to working together with you to make FSU and UMB all that it can be.

In Solidarity,

Jason & Jessica

 

 

 

Dear Member,

We write to make sure you hear directly from us as to why no agreement about parking fees has been reached.  As you know, a coalition of the Faculty, Classified Staff, Professional Staff and Graduate Employee unions has been in negotiations over transportation and parking fees over the past three years. The failure to reach an agreement, we believe, is due to the campus administration’s insistence on treating those of us who drive to campus solely as a source of revenue, without consideration to the harmful impacts that ever-increasing parking fees has on our community and institution.

First, let’s be clear on the facts.  Individuals who park on campus collectively pay over $6 million annually in parking fees.  The vast majority of this — $3.8 million in 2025 – is paid at the “cash” rate (rather than through a discounted pass) because the passes are priced so that they are too expensive for students and employees who drive to campus fewer than 3 days a week on average.  This structure leaves many members of our community paying $15 each time they park on campus.

No other UMass campus, state university or community college charges its students, staff or faculty this much money to park on campus.

The only reason the administration has provided in defense of the extraordinarily expensive campus parking is the desire to have parkers generate sufficient revenue to not only cover the operations of the parking system (which totaled $3.4 million in 2025), but to additionally cover all debt and depreciation associated with all parking facilities.  The debt and depreciation for parking facilities alone totaled over $6 million in 2025 and is anticipated to continue to cost about $6 million each year for the foreseeable future.

This is an insupportable position, and, based on our research, one that no other public higher education institution has taken when it comes to addressing campus debt. We understand that parking revenues should cover the costs to maintain parking areas but we consider it to be unethical to require costs to include all current and future debt incurred by the University in having the structures built. It is completely unfair to ask students and employees to bear the cost of such debt.

When we began transportation bargaining in 2023, the coalition put forward a package that offered the University an “escalator clause” with modest, automatic parking price increases in return for a package of transportation benefits that included the following:

• a sliding scale that reduced parking costs for union members who earn less than $50,000;
• 30-use pass with reduced parking fees to reduce parking costs for all union members;
• 50% MBTA pass subsidy;
• Daily rate of $15 (subject to increases according to the escalator clause)

Unfortunately, the administration was only willing to agree to a sliding scale that would have increased parking costs for everyone, even those who earn less than $50,000. They also refused to include a 30-use pass option, would agree to no more than a 20% MBTA pass subsidy, and an $18 a daily rate. At the last session, the University added a proposal to round the escalator increases to the nearest dollar, potentially increasing the parking costs even more.

We have brought our concerns to the administration many times over the years, begging for them to moderate their proposals and their expectations of revenue from parking.  But no change in position manifested at the bargaining table.

As a result of not reaching an agreement with the coalition, MOUs signed by the parties in 2025 will go into effect (see MOU 7 and MOU 7A in the FSU contract). During main table negotiations (for our contracts), each union was presented with a proposal to allow administration in each new fiscal year to raise parking rates only if parking expenditure (including debt) exceeds revenues.  The resulting rate increase will not exceed the contract’s cost of living increase. We expect the administration to release information soon about how much parking costs will increase on Sept. 1, 2026.

We all know that budgets and financial decisions reflect the values of an organization.  Our administration’s position on parking fees shows clearly that it values our students and employees solely as sources of revenue, rather than as human beings who are essential members of the UMB community.

If, at any time, the administration wants to rethink its position, we are willing to recommence bargaining.

Union Coalition Members

Classified Staff Union: Alexa MacPherson, Jariza Rodriguez and Anna Rose (MTA field representative)

Department Chairs Union: Michael Carr

Faculty Staff Union: Caroline Coscia, Lorenzo Nencioli (FSU Senior Staff), Katie D’Urso (MTA field representatives)

Professional Staff Union: Anneta Argyres, Michelle Browning, Mary Jo Connelly (PSU Staff)

 

 

 

Dear Colleagues,

In your most recent paycheck, you should have received a 2.25% raise to your salary. This increase is the result of our most recent contract negotiations, which concluded last year, and is one of five increases totaling 12.5% throughout the life of the FSU contract (see the table below). Our next bargaining cycle is scheduled to start this fall, so keep an eye out for information from us about how to get involved as we continue pushing for better working conditions and higher salaries for all our members. Please reach out to us at fsu@umb.edu with any questions.

facultystaffunion.org

Quinn/2/81C

UMass Boston

100 Morrissey Blvd.

Boston, MA 02125

(617) 287-6295 | fsu@umb.edu

 

 

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to share an upcoming event and research project funded by the FSU Anti-Racism Grant Program.

The “Unmasking Gendered Racialization in Online Teaching: Support for Contingent Women of Color Faculty at UMass Boston” initiative focuses on online classrooms, its broader purpose is to support all contingent faculty at UMass Boston—including graduate teaching assistants—especially those who identify as women of color. Whether you identify as a contingent woman of color faculty member at UMass Boston or not, you are cordially invited to participate.

Please sign up to join a conversation with Dr. Detra Price-Dennis on June 18th at 1 p.m. ET. Dr. Price-Dennis is a leading scholar in racial literacy in digital classrooms and the president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English. You can register for the event using this registration link.

Please also click here to participate in an online survey where you can share your story as contingent women of color faculty at UMass Boston. Participants will receive gift cards for completing the survey and/or participating in the focus group.

Please see the attached flyer for full details and registration links.

For questions, please reach out to the grant recipient to Minh Nguyen at nghia.nguyen@umb.edu.

 

Saturday, June 6

10:30am – 1pm EDT

Copley Square

Come join the MTA’s LGBTQ+ Committee to march in the Boston Pride 4 the People Parade! This is one of the most uplifting, affirming events of the year! Support and be supported by so many folks, especially young people. Then afterwards join the MTA contingent for lunch at the MTA office near the State House. For those who may not be able to walk the whole parade, there will be a yellow school bus following along. Sign up here.

 

 

 

Dear members,

The coalition of unions is holding a member meeting to provide you with an update on the status of parking and transportation bargaining including the latest union coalition proposal and administration counter proposal.

Most importantly, we will share what happens on July 1, 2026, if we do not reach an agreement. We also seek your feedback to tell us what proposal items are most important to you.

Please attend and provide us with feedback.

Date: Wednesday, June 3rd, 12-1pm. U-Hall 1300.

Zoom Option: (contact FSU or Caroline Coscia for Zoom information).

Sincerely,

Parking & Transportation Coalition

 

 

 

 

Dear Member,

Please join us and your colleagues from the CSU, FSU, GEO and PSU Unions and concerned students on June 3rd to hear the latest on what UMB admin is proposing for parking fee increases–both a daily rate increase and an annual ‘escalator’–and what your campus unions (PSU, FSU, CSU, DCU) have been fighting to win.

We want to hear your thoughts on the options we’re facing.

Date: Wednesday June 3rd, 12-1pm. U-Hall 1300.

Zoom Option: (contact FSU or Caroline Coscia for Zoom information).

Dear Faculty and Librarians,

This is the last Nuts & Bolts of the semester.  Four years ago, the Executive Committee discussed how to share information with you. We came up with a weekly email highlighting current FSU actions/activities, contract information, and MTA information. I thank Brian White for naming the email Nuts & Bolts.

Period of non-responsibility

Most faculty are on academic-year appointments. The nine-month appointment states the faculty member works a fixed period which is nine months. The remaining three months (June, July, and August) are the period of non-responsibility.

Update: Parking & Transportation Bargaining Session

Parking coalition members (CSU, DCU. FSU, GEO and PSU) met May 13th to hear the administration’s counter related to economic issues – daily rate, 30 use passes, sliding scale rate and MBTA subsidy percent. What we received was disappointing.  In fact, the coalition believes what was presented is regressive.  We strongly expressed our displeasure about what was presented. We are back at the table on May 26th.

Next steps: watch for an email about an all-union June 3rd meeting to provide an update on our proposal, UMB’s counters and what happens if we do not reach an agreement by July 1, 2026.

Know Your Contract: Additional students above course capacities

For both in-person and distance learning courses, once course capacities are reached, only the individual faculty member may admit additional students (see Article 15.4 of the contract for more information). Faculty members have full discretion in this regard with exception of the multi-section courses referenced in 15.4.

Know Your Contract: Phased Retirement

Tenure track members and NTT/Librarians on continuing appointments may participate in this program that allows members to reduce their percentage of time to 50% for up to 2 years prior to separation from the university (see Article 27.14 for more info).

No on 90 Campaign: Board of Higher Education to Allow 90 credit Bachelor’s Degrees

The Massachusetts Board of Higher Education is implementing a pilot program for a 90-credit bachelor’s degree. Currently, a degree requires 120 credits.  This change impacts the number of classes required plus the type of classes necessary to reach 90 credits.

MTA is forming a committee of higher ed members to organize against the change. If you are interested, please contact FSU.

MTA 2026 Summer Conference, July 26th to 29th at UMass Amherst

Join fellow union members at the MTA Summer Conference.  Workshop sessions include union skills, bargaining, and retirement planning.

This year, Monday, July 27th,is devoted to higher education members with workshops and events specifically for us.

Watch for MTA emails with updated conference information including registration and lodging.  Click here for more information.

MTA Benefits: Discount Directory

MTA Benefits has a wide variety of discounts from entertainment, restaurants, fitness, bookstores, retail and theme parks.  Check out  https://www.mtabenefits.com/discounts/discount-directory

Although many of us are heading into a period of non-responsibility, the FSU works all year.  If you have a question, please do email us.

Sincerely,

Caroline Coscia

FSU President

Senior Lecturer II

Political Science Department