ABOUT THE CMU FACULTY ASSOCIATION

"CMU Faculty Association: The voice of the faculty for over 40 years."

The Faculty Association (FA) was organized in 1969 and is the oldest faculty union at a 4-year institution in the United States. Affiliated with the Michigan Education Association and the National Education Association, the FA is the sole representative of the regular faculty when it comes to our working condition.

The FA serves faculty in a variety of ways including negotiating the collective bargaining agreement that covers all full-time regular faculty. Equally important is the FA's work pursuing formal grievances to protect the interests of various individual faculty and groups of faculty that may have been harmed in some way by CMU Administration decisions and activities. Representatives of the FA and the administration meet regularly to discuss contract issues and faculty concerns. In addition, members of the FA – your colleagues – sit on numerous budgetary, research and policy-making committees across the campus.

What are the advantages of joining the CMU Faculty Association?

You get a much greater voice in the operations of the organization that represents bargaining unit members.

As members of the NEA and MEA, members of the Faculty Association automatically receive $1,000,000 in professional liability insurance through NEA. They are also eligible for group rates on auto insurance and life insurance, as well as a number of other financial services. (See www.mea.org and www.nea.org for details.)

Members can have the dues deducted from their salaries over the year; fee payers must pay in a lump sum.

Members are eligible to vote in FA elections and referenda, and are eligible to serve as officers, board members, and members of FA committees.

What if You Do Not Join?

Currently, about 95% of regular faculty members belong to the Association. Nevertheless, you are not required to join. If you do not join, the law in Michigan requires you to pay a "service fee" for the benefits you receive, including full rights to have your interests represented by the FA and its parent associations in bargaining, grievances, and investigations or disciplinary hearings. Non-members, called "fee payers," pay an amount determined each year by a court-established process. In recent years, this amount has been approximately 80% of regular FA dues. The exact amount owed is determined in part by responses to a questionnaire contained in a "Hudson packet" sent annually to fee-payers in December.