BY MEGAN DELANEY, GABRIELLE HACKENBERG, AND AMANDA STOJANOV

The Faculty Association of Monmouth University (FAMCO) recently finished an extensive reopener with university administration regarding our healthcare costs and plans. We were aware that our members had been overpaying for healthcare for several years and that the administration was diverting costs onto members through the cover of choice. FAMCO’s goal was to ensure that the costs of healthcare were shared equitably between the university and our members, and that our traditional high-quality preferred provider organization (PPO) plan remained protected for our members in the context of the university’s long-term goal to eliminate it. Our experience provided several insights we felt worthy of sharing, especially if it helps others as they bargain for fair and equitable healthcare. Our takeaways include the need to: have a strong organizing campaign that supports bargaining efforts; ongoing and clear member communication and education; and a commitment to stand firm against false narratives about healthcare costs. 

In 2021, FAMCO left the bargaining table with an agreement to reopen the contract should the university make changes that impacted the costs of healthcare to the university so that the union would have an opportunity to renegotiate how the savings would be fairly distributed to our members. Shortly after, the university moved to a self-insurance model, which triggered the university’s obligation to negotiate the costs of healthcare for our members in the remaining years of the agreement. We took swift action to build our union power within FAMCO and create a coalition with our unionized colleagues across campus among all employees. Through our healthcare campaign, we communicated a clear agenda to reduce out-of-pocket expenses for our high-deductible plan, protect our traditional PPO plan, and establish out-of-network options for members enrolled in our high-deductible plan, among other items on our larger healthcare bargaining platform.  

We responded with strength and unity, which started with doing the work of educating ourselves, with the help of labor union healthcare experts, about the true fiscal realities of healthcare. We organized our members to take public action and share their concerns about the university’s unfounded rate increases directly to the university president, filed a grievance on failure to abide by the reopener clause of the contract, and reached out to the board of trustees with personalized holiday cards from our members that read “All We Want for the Holidays is Affordable and High Quality Healthcare!” Despite our strong and meaningful campaign work, the administration delayed progress by dismissing multiple information requests. This conduct caused us to file a grievance and an unfair labor practice charge for the missing information. The university hired a new lead negotiator from an external law firm to bargain against as we moved to settle rates for the final year. This decision on the part of the university was telling, as the firm had recently been hired by a peer institution in an attempt to redefine their bargaining unit and significantly weaken the power of faculty to exercise shared governance while also attempting to win major economic concessions. We held our ground during uncertain times, and eventually developed the “Fair or Freeze” campaign, demonstrating that the union was willing to contribute our fair share to the projected rate increases so long as the university could justify them. Otherwise, we demanded a rate freeze. With the continued support of members, the campaign included “red alert” red shirt days, a letter to the editor to our school paper, distributing buttons, and flyer campaigns at our fall convocation when local officials were in attendance. This campaign demonstrated our union’s power and helped us get to the finish line of a long and arduous negotiation, resulting in a freeze of our monthly premiums for all three contract years, and a retention of the traditional PPO plan for our members

Although we were successful in freezing monthly healthcare costs for our members through the duration of our contract, we also had to make major concessions. The university demanded that we add another plan to our existing options under the guise that more options meant better choices. The university touted this “choice” as doing us a favor by adding “value,” but we knew that this was false. Under the cover of choice were hidden reductions in actual quality of healthcare and the shifting of the burden of the cost onto members. We would come to learn that this tactic of relying on the narrative of “choice” to disguise the goal of shifting the burden of healthcare costs unfairly onto employees is a familiar management tool.

This experience offered us several key takeaways. Understanding the actuarial process of healthcare costs is crucial to success and working with a labor union healthcare expert assured us that understanding a process that looks complex and incomprehensible is possible. This counteracts the administration’s position that healthcare costs are far too complex for faculty to decipher. As such, we were able to feel confident that negotiating for a rate reduction or rate freeze over time was both an affordable and reasonable request, debunking the myth that “healthcare costs are going up so your costs must increase too.” Choice matters too, but it needs to be a genuine choice that meets members’ needs,  not a disguise for unfair cost shifting. Having access to quality and affordable healthcare is a basic human right and healthy members correlate to productive university employees. As we move into full contract negotiations, we will stand firm on these tenets and continue to advocate for our members and their families.

Megan Delaney is an associate professor of psychology. Her research and clinical interest focuses on ecopsychology, the interchange of the natural world and mental health. She was a member of FAMCOs recent healthcare campaign team and is currently serving on the contract renegotiating team. Gabrielle Hackenberg is the academic fieldwork coordinator and a specialist professor in the Doctorate of Occupational Therapy Program at Monmouth University. She also serves as the secretary for FAMCO and was lead negotiator for the healthcare re-opener over the last two years. Amanda Stojanov earned her MFA from UCLA in 2017 and now serves as an assistant professor of digital media at Monmouth University. She was on the negotiating team for FAMCOs recent healthcare campaign.