James N. Gregory
President UW-AAUP

January 21, 2002

My name is James Gregory. I am an associate professor of history at UW Seattle campus and the president of the UW chapter of the American Association of University Professors. Since 1919 AAUP has represented faculty on my campus and around the country placing first priority on the protection of academic freedom and practice of shared governance. We have 200 members on the UW campus, 44,000 members nationwide.

AAUP strongly supports this bill. I speak for our members and I think also the vast majority of UW faculty when I say we see this as a matter of basic rights. Most UW faculty probably do not want to unionize, at least not now. But we do want the right to decide that issue for ourselves. We resent being second class citizens in this state, virtually the only employees in public or private sector denied the right of representation and collective bargaining.

I've spent some time examining the laws of other states. I've found only one other example of a state that excludes higher education personnel from the basic package of employee labor relations. That's Missouri. Everywhere else from Alaska to Florida, from Maine to California faculty have the same rights as everyone else who works for the state. Universities and colleges across the country operate under laws similar to what is proposed today and no one who knows the universities of states like California, Massacusetts, Michigan, and Illinois thinks they have been in any way harmed.

(I might add here since the subject has come up that I have found only one state law that prohibits bargaining over terms of appointment and promotion. All the rest are silent and it has not been a problem. Nowhere where unions do represent the faculty has tenure or other standards been bargained away. That is not what unions do. They try strengthen. California is the exception, it prohibits bargaining on standards of appointment but has some very complicated clauses that restore that issue to bargaining if the Faculty Senates are stripped of their authority--our bill is simpler.)

I would be happy to answer questions about those various laws but I am going to end this statement on a different point.

It is altogether fitting that we meet here on Martin Luther Kings' birthday. Many people have died over the course of American history securing the right to workplace representation and collective bargaining, including the man we honor today. My colleague Mike Honey, who has authored two books on Dr. King, may say more about this. But I would like to leave you with this thought: On the last day of his life April 4, 1968 Dr. King was in Memphis. He had gone there to support a strike by that city's sanitation workers. Do you know why they were striking? Because that state and that city had refused to acknowledge that public employees had a right to collective bargaining.

History speaks very loudly today. It calls upon us to fix this flaw in our state laws and establish that all employees have certain fundamental workplace rights.

Thank you.