Dear Colleagues,

After a very long and arduous ​series of bargaining sessions, the Faculty Federation and Administration have concluded negotiations for a successor bargaining agreement. This tentative agreement, if ratified by the membership, will supersede the 2020-2023 CBA and 2023-2024 salary increase MOA (which were extended by agreement while these negotiations continued).  These negotiations began in early 2024 with the last bargaining session taking place this past Wednesday, February 4. The Faculty Federation received the Administration’s (positive) response to two final amendments requested by the Federation’s bargaining team yesterday afternoon.

The next steps involve preparing a comprehensive MOA describing all of the changes to the CBA that have been tentatively agreed to by the Federation’s bargaining team and the Administration.  This will be shared with the membership of the Federation and an informational meeting held (in person with a Zoom option) where members can ask questions about the changes being proposed.  This will be followed by a ratification vote, done using Qualtrics, where members can vote on whether or not to ratify the new agreement. The date and time of this informational meeting and ratification vote will be announced to the membership as soon as we have the comprehensive MOA ready to share.

If a majority of the membership votes in favor,  the new CBA will be forwarded to the UMass President’s Office for review, then to the Governor’s Office for inclusion in a supplemental funding bill that would be voted on by the House and Senate. Once this is passed, the funds for our well-deserved salary increases will be released to the UMass system.  The Federation has confirmed that there is a February supplemental funding bill being prepared, and the Administration has assured the Federation that the President’s Office is ready to expedite their approval of a ratified successor CBA. Every effort will be made to ensure that our contract is in this supplemental funding bill.

Finally, I want to thank all of the members of the Federation’s negotiating team:  Joshua Botvin, Eric Casero, Cathy Curran, Megan Dawe, Lorraine Heffernan, Dayalan Kasilingam, Eric Larson, Viviane Saleh-Hanna, Kristen Sethares and Amy Vaughan-Thomas, as well as the Federation’s AFT field representative and lead negotiator from AFT-Massachusetts, Mike Regan.  Without each of their contributions at the bargaining table, and their work carefully reviewing the various proposals and counter proposals, we would not have gotten to this point.

In Solidarity!