HISTORICAL SKETCH of the
MORAINE VALLEY FACULTY ASSOCIATION
A Chapter of Local 1600
American Federation of Teachers
Joseph T. Hapak *
Joe Hapak was a Professor of History
at Moraine Valley who retired in 2002
In August 1971, when the fourth fall semester began at Moraine Valley Community College, activity on campus predictably centered on the new academic year. Amid the last-minute preparations for class that summer, the young college’s faculty inaugurated an organization to speak for it on matters of concern to their well-being as teachers. An earlier attempt to form a union in 1969 had been quickly stifled. The college president, reverting to the rhetoric invoked at the initial all-staff meetings which preceded the opening of the new college in 1968, had again urged the faculty to voice their concerns at committee meetings. For two years, the teaching staff, as committee members, recommended policies which were repeatedly ignored. When the merit pay committee suffered this same fate, a number of its members decided that the faculty needed an organized presence on campus to back up its recommendations.
The first step in forming such a group occurred in the 400 Building, then the school’s Data Processing Program office. Five men met at Dick Loschetter’s desk to consider their options. Mitch Povsner, Dennis Ludden, Dick Fritz, and Mike Haynes entered the building one by one, by different doors, at different times, to avoid arousing suspicion. Once together, however, a sense of uneasiness pervaded the group, and they decided to adjourn to Greene’s West. Leaving as they had come, they resumed the discussion at the restaurant. Their deliberations resulted in setting a date for an all-faculty meeting, off campus, whose purpose was t form a union. Mitch Povsner, the first president of the Faculty Association, offered his home for the session which met on Friday, September 10, 1971, with some 60 teachers present.
A second meeting a week later at the same place continued the process of establishing a new chapter of Cook County College Teachers Union, Local 1600, American Federation of Teachers. The tentative objectives attached to the notice for the meeting, among other things, stated: “We will act as the professional liaison between the entire teaching faculty and the Board of Trustees of Moraine Valley Community College.” This goal was more easily formulated than achieved.
On October 3, the Faculty Association notified the Board of Trustees of its existence and requested an election to determine whether the new body would have the right to bargain collectively for the faculty. Throughout the fall and winter a war of nerves took place on campus as the administration and the faculty prepared for the electoral confrontation. The officers of the Faculty Association realized that, if they were rejected at the polls, they would suffer the same fate as those involved in the attempted organization in 1969. Its leaders were no longer on the staff. When the votes were counted on February 18, 1972, the new group’s leaders could breathe more easily for by a five-vote margin, the faculty had ratified the Association as its sole bargaining agent.
Negotiations with the Board shortly resulted in the first collective bargaining agreement which ran from July 1, 1972 to June 10, 1974. In its second year, the Association began to issue a NEWSLETTER which still appears during the school year.
The most serious crisis that the union faced occurred in 1974. Following its narrow victory, the group had slowly grown in membership. As negotiations for a new contract bogged down and the expiration date for the first agreement passed, it became obvious that the administration was refusing to address questions which the faculty had identified as crucial to a satisfactory new agreement. The sudden death of the school’s first president, who had never reconciled himself to the union, and the appointment of his successor failed to solve the impasse. Though the faculty began the fall semester as a sign of good-faith bargaining, after two weeks, the first and only strike in the college’s history began. Monday, September 9, 1974, marked two years minus one day from the organizational meeting at Mitch Povsner’s house. The administration’s response was a lockout.
Those who lived through those three traumatic weeks will never forget them. At the very end, before federal arbitration settled the dispute, each faculty member twice received a certified letter—the first arrived “postage due”—containing a contract and notice that unless it was returned by a specific date, the Board would no longer consider the recipient an employee of the college. When classes resumed on October 4, a residue of mutual bitterness long hampered good faculty-administration relations. The new contract, establishing among other gains a 17-week semester, ran until June 30, 1976.
When, as the strike was ending, the Board issued a list of promotions, three eligible union activists discovered that their names were not on it. The women grieved the denial of promotion, which action the administration fought contractually for two years, all the way to binding arbitration. In November 1976, the arbitrator rendered a decision in favor of the grievants after the third contract had already taken effect.
Nothing as dramatic as the events already related has since occurred in the Faculty Association’s history. Negotiations in 1976 and 1978 provoked some concern, but agreement was reached without confrontation.
In 1980, however, some ominous parallels to 1974 clouded the course of negotiations. The chief obstacle to a new contract was the administration’s demand to revise the method for appointment to academic rank at the college. Under the initial proposal all faculty members would have been reclassified in rank based upon new degree requirements for each level. The fall semester again opened without a settled contract, though negotiations had not as before reached a full stalemate. The negotiating team continued to meet with the Board’s lawyer, as the union’s executive committee accepted the negotiators’ recommendation to authorize informational picketing before the September Board meeting. A breakthrough before then rendered this action moot; both sides accepted a compromise settlement which met the major objections of the other. The new 3-year contract also departed from precedent in its duration.
Membership in the chapter has steadily climbed to the point where over 90 percent of the bargaining unit belongs to the union. Each set of negotiations has brought in new members, including a number who had earlier refused to join.
Since 1973, the union has endorsed and supported candidates for the Board of Trustees with varied success.
In 1975, the Association established, with the encouragement of Local 1600 headquarters, two scholarships awarded each semester to students enrolled at Moraine Valley. The grant has risen from $75 to $175.
In February 1972, after the union won the collective bargaining election, one dissatisfied faculty member complained to a union member, “You’ve made me just like a truck driver.” The course of the past ten years casts doubt on this assessment. The union has responsibly represented the interests of the faculty without slighting its obligation to the student body and the support staff, each of which in its own way is essential to the college’s operation.
Today one would find it hard to imagine that five faculty members would fear to gather on campus, lest they jeopardize their jobs. For this improvement, the union is responsible, and Moraine Valley Community College is a better college because of this openness.
[NOTE: written by Joseph T. Hapak for the Tenth Anniversary Celebration on February 26, 1982]