BY TOM ROONEY

With permission, we are sharing the text of a Facebook post by Tom Rooney, AAUP-WSU treasurer and member of the union’s negotiating team. He wrote it this morning, after Wright State University faculty and the WSU administration came to a tentative agreement, ending the faculty strike that began on January 22.

A journey and a meditation.

Back in late 2016, my local union president asked if I would be on the negotiating team. Our contract was expiring in June 2017. Our university was heading into a financial crisis. He told me that there was no money to argue over, and there was some contract language to clean up, and that we should have the whole thing wrapped up in 4–5 months. It would be a good opportunity to represent the interests of my colleagues.

Well, everything went sideways. Contract negotiations were suspended in March 2017. Our university administration paid a half million dollars to bring in an outside negotiator, who stonewalled us late into 2018. We hit an impasse, and a month ago our administration imposed a draconian contract that undermined our ability to do our job as educators.

Our union fought back. We were on strike for 20 days—he second longest strike of any public university in the US. We successfully defeated attacks on tenure, attacks on earning continuing contracts, attacks on the number of classes we teach per semester, attacks on our state-protected rights to bargain the terms of our health care insurance, attacks on our rights to teach in summer session, and our rights to have merit pay based on a fair, objective system instead of an imposed system of brown-nosing fealty.

This came at great personal cost to everyone who went on strike. We were not striking for more money, in fact, we knew we were going to lose ground economically regardless. We were striking to protect student learning conditions. There were lost wages and lost health insurance. Everyone who went on strike lost thousands of dollars. And for what? A 0% raise in 2019. A 0% raise in 2020. A 0% raise in 2021. But we protected student learning conditions.

I’m proud of my colleagues—instructors, lecturers, senior lecturers, assistant professors, associate professors, professors–who all came together to fight. They were not fighting for more money. They were fighting for what was right. They stuck together. And in the end, they won.

In 2017 and 2018, I felt like I was playing an out-sized role as a negotiator. But as our faculty came together in 2018 and 2019 AS A UNION, my role diminished. So many people stepped in and took on responsibilities. They helped organize our faculty. They helped organize a strike. They all helped us win.

As Rudy Fichtenbaum taught me, negotiators draw no power from clever words or negotiating tactics. Power comes from the people not at the table—the people who are ready to spring into action should they be called upon. The union of workers who have each other’s back, and ours.

The fight for a fair contract has ended. The fight for the heart and soul of Wright State has just begun.

Tom Rooney is a professor of biological sciences at Wright State University and AAUP-WSU treasurer and negotiating team member.