Strategies in Bargaining Faculty Retrenchment Provisions: Insights from Cases of Implementing Contract Language

In this article on faculty (and professional staff) retrenchment, based on my recent national analysis of 506 collective bargaining agreements, I delineate four strategies to negotiating the topic found in contract provisions (with more than one strategy often found in the same contract). The strategies are: Procedural (focused on due process); consultative (addressing employee involvement in deliberations); conditional (defining pre-conditions of retrenchment); and re-alignment (speaking to reversing the decades-long relative disinvestment in academic and student facing professional staff). In exploring four cases of institutions—two community colleges and two universities—experiencing retrenchment, I consider how the contract provisions have played out in their implementation. In closing, I offer insights about the importance of the specificity of language, of shared and accessible data, and of the strength of the bargaining unit. I also encourage institutions to consider managing to be different, to move beyond the seemingly never-ending austerity agenda which has failed to achieve enduring sustainability or enhanced public support, and to adopt a "re-alignment" approach. That would involve exercising strategic imagination to re-focus institutional priorities and re-investment on colleges and universities' core academic, educational, and public missions.