FCC faculty union delivers letter to president urging bargaining agreement

On Thursday afternoon, about a dozen members of Frederick Community College’s full-time faculty union gathered outside the school’s student center and walked toward the office of the college’s president, Annesa Payne Cheek.

Aaron Clayton, an English professor and union member, had a stack of papers in hand, including an open letter from the union’s members.

The letter urges Cheek and FCC’s Board of Trustees to make progress on negotiating “a fair collective bargaining agreement” with the union’s bargaining team and encourages FCC administration to listen to faculty voices.

The other papers contained about 250 signatures from faculty and community members supporting the letter.

When the union members reached Cheek’s office, Clayton handed the papers to Theresa Dorsey, the administrative coordinator for the president’s office.

He asked Dorsey to relay the letter and signatures to the president and asked that whenever Cheek is available that she meet with the union to discuss its priorities for a collective bargaining agreement.

Delivering the letter and signatures to Cheek’s office will “demonstrate that it’s not just the members of the bargaining team speaking for themselves, but they are speaking for a large group of people,” Clayton said in an interview after delivering the letter.

In an emailed statement to The Frederick News-Post on Thursday, FCC Labor Relations Specialist Pamela Murphy said the college’s labor negotiations team is “committed to engaging in good faith bargaining pursuant to requirements under Maryland law, which include negotiating matters relating to wages, hours, and working conditions of bargaining unit members.”

“Our negotiations, however, do not include the statutory authority and duties of the College, as entrusted to the Board of Trustees and the President by Maryland law. We welcome continued discussions, even throughout the summer,” Murphy said in the statement.

Cheek and Board of Trustees Chair Carolyn Kimberlin did not respond to requests for comment via email on the open letter, which was posted on change.org on March 14.

FCC’s faculty voted in August 2023 to form a union. It is represented by the Maryland arm of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which represents more than 18,000 professionals across multiple fields.

The faculty union and the college began negotiating last fall for a collective bargaining agreement (CBA), according to Lindsay Sanders, an AFT-Maryland higher education organizer.

A CBA is a legal contract between an employer and the union representing its employees. It sets the terms and conditions of employment in multiple areas, including wages, working conditions, employee benefits and the union’s and employer’s rights and responsibilities, according to Thomson Reuters Practical Law.

Ana Maria Pinzon, an associate professor of world languages and one of the union’s bargaining team members, said the union currently has 17 proposed articles for the CBA on the table and one tentative agreement.

Since negotiations began, Sanders said, the Board of Trustees or Cheek has denied the union’s requests to schedule meetings.

The union also requested to be put on the Board of Trustees’ monthly meeting agendas multiple times and hasn’t been added to those agendas.

While the college’s labor negotiations team members are the ones with the authority to negotiate, Sanders said, that team is ultimately directed by the college administration.

“We hope that the administrators will exercise the robust power that they have to either bargain a good contract or direct their designees to bargain a good contract,” she said.

Sue Johnson, a computer science professor at FCC and member of the Frederick County Board of Education, said the college has gone through “ebbs and flows” in terms of how much input faculty has had on the workings of the school.

“The Board of Trustees ... [is] subject to everything that a public body should be subject to, so one of the next things that we would like to see is having the Board of Trustees have a dialogue with the faculty,” Johnson said.

The open letter advocates for shared governance as part of the CBA. Clayton said shared governance would mean that faculty members, who are impacted by decision-making and policies at FCC, “are involved in the process of reviewing and making those policies.”

“As Sue was stating, there have been a lot of ebbs and flows, and that often depends on who’s the president or who’s in administration at that time,” he said. “Having [shared governance] enshrined or protected in a contract helps ensure it won’t depend on who’s in the administration.”