Hi! My name is Deborah Nycz. I am a 23 year veteran of teaching Chemistry at Broward Community College. I am also one of the organizers of our UFF Chapter and was the second President of the Chapter. I am also a very active member of our Faculty Senate.

I know you are going to have a vote on whether to have a Union or not at FCCJ. I hope you vote for the Union. It is your protection against unilateral changes in your work conditions. It gives you legal and binding rights that a Senate cannot give you. I know I've worked under both systems. I really like what we have now. Our Senate deals with the Academic issues and we get very good discussions on topics of curriculum and class size and transferring students, etc. The Union bargains our work conditions and salary. We work with our College, our Board of Trustees and President to lobby for more money, financial aid for all students(part-time and full-time) and so on.

One of the work conditions we bargained concerns getting extra pay for teaching labs. If you have labs courses (ours are separate) they do not count as much as a lecture. For our base load we use adjusted credit hours. These are the contact and credit hours added together and the sum divided by two. A 3 hour-1 credit chem lab counts as 2 adjusted credit hours. We need a total of 15 for load during a major term. At the end of the two terms we teach, if our total of credit hours and contact hours are above the 30, we get paid for the extra hours at our extra pay rate. This is lower than our regular rate but it makes teaching labs as part of our base better. Some of our Faculty teach lots of labs in their base and can get 8 thousand dollars more at the end of the year. It is not perfect, but it is better. We will continue to work to get hour for hour!!!

Also, we no longer have to teach in the summer and we bargained it in such a way we lost no pay and still had some raises during the conversion time. If we wish, can work up to 12 adjusted hours in the summer for extra pay. We do this as adjuncts so we do not have to work the 25 hour rule. We just have to keep one office hour per class per week.

I feel we would never have gotten these without the Union and since they are in a contract, they cannot be taken away from us unilaterally.

I wish you the best on your coming election and I hope to see you as part of the Organized Higher Ed Chapters in Florida. If you have any questions, feel free to call me at 954-475-6744(954-201-6744) or e-mail at dnycz@broward.edu.

Yours in Solidarity,
Debbie Nycz