Members of Eastern’s chapter of the University Professionals of Illinois and the administration are in the process of finalizing the contract language for UPI members to ratify.

Chemistry professor Jon Blitz, the UPI/EIU chief negotiator, said his hopes are for the contract language to be finalized by next week.

“That’s the best case scenario,” he said.

Once both bargaining teams agree upon the contract language, it will be submitted to the UPI members for ratification. If ratified, the agreement will next move on to the Board of Trustees for final approval. This agreement will be in effect for two years, in which the administration and the UPI will revisit negotiations.

Although the board was not scheduled to meet again until mid-March, Blitz said “they have graciously agreed to meet earlier so we can get our raises in the March 1 paycheck.”

Blitz said the administration put together a first draft over break, based on the Dec. 13 tentative agreement, and the UPI/EIU bargaining team received the draft the first day of classes.

“It took us a little bit of time to look over what was done,” Blitz said. “Now we’re going back to administration saying ‘Here are the things we thought we agreed to that maybe you missed in the first draft.’ We were warned to go through it carefully. Their draft wasn’t intended to be final.”

In the tentative agreement, the Unit A and Unit B faculty will receive a 1.5 percent increase retroactive for this year, and a 1.25 percent increase next year.

“I think (these numbers are fair) given these economic times,” Blitz said.

One of the biggest landmarks of the tentative agreement is the compromise on furloughs. Blitz said there is an agreement in place that if the university declares exigency, the UPI will be able to bargain over the implementation of furloughs.

However, this furlough policy will not be included in the contract. Blitz said this policy would go into a Memorandum of Agreement, which is a separate document, explicitly laying out the terms.

Another key point during the negotiations was the application of credit units. For this matter, there was language included in the contract so that once it was open to negotiations credit units may be addressed.

Although the UPI members were able to do this already, it is now explicitly included in the contract.

“(Having the right was) what we were after,” Blitz said.

During the course of the negotiations, the academic support professionals raised concerns over minima salary levels and language in the previous contract. Blitz said there was a “minor compromise” in this area.

The UPI was able to negotiate a little bit of language so the academic support professionals without a master’s degree could continue to move up minima salary levels, Blitz said.

Another compromise for the academic support professionals was changing the wording of the top two academic support professionals salary lanes will be changed from “requiring at least a master’s degree” to “requiring or preferring at least a master’s degree.”

Although this may not seem like a big difference, this language was a concern for negotiation team member Jeffrey Duck, an academic adviser, and many other academic support professionals, Daily Eastern News reported on Oct. 29.

Blitz said he believes this small compromise will please the academic support professionals.

“I think we got what we could on that. I don’t think we could have gotten any more,” he said.

The annually contracted faculty will also see a change from the previous agreement. The annually contracted faculty will now be offered multi-year contracts based on what they receive on the reemployment roster, Blitz said.

Also, the annually contracted faculty is now able to bring counter offers of employment from other universities to bring to the administration to see if those terms will be matched, Blitz said.

“There’s no obligations on the university’s part to pay it, but the same kind of language (the annually contracted faculty) and tenure-track faculty have,” he added.

As a part of the new contract, faculty members from both units will now have five days to submit a written request for reconsideration of a negative evaluation, rather than three days.

“(The UPI) felt that this was a big decision and this way, you have at least a week to mull it over, which we think felt a little more reasonable,” Blitz said.

Shelley Holmgren can be reached at 581-2812

or meholmgren@eiu.edu.