Direct Action Works.

You may have seen that thanks to the direct action of students, staff, and faculty united, our Facilities Management workers will be getting the pay that they rightly demanded!   

It was already true before, and it’s proven true even more: Direct Action Works.

A huge congratulations and a massive debt of thanks to everyone who fought together to support our community. This is a huge win, and we have this win entirely because of the grassroots work put in by staff, students, and faculty. 

As the LMU-AAUP chapter said last year: we stand in unequivocal solidarity with facilities management workers at LMU and support their fair, just, and reasonable demands for better wages and working conditions. Their work is essential to the work of the university and their cause is our cause. This is true today and will be true tomorrow. 

Because, we must also remember:

• the board of trustees thinks it is a good idea to spend 5.75 million dollars to buy President Snyder a new house (even as this administration has yet to meaningfully answer questions about how our endowment is performing or how money is being spent).
• And faculty and staff were greeted with more than 200 additional students this fall while requests for full-time faculty lines were delayed (again).
• And our students are paying higher tuition than ever.
• And despite deciding to play a dubious “rankings game,” LMU dropped to 77^th.
• Faculty and staff have also still not been made whole from austerity cuts to benefits…
• and faculty and staff are pitted against each other for “merit pay,” which has never kept pace with inflation, even before inflation spiked this year. 

And just this week, we’ve learned that our colleagues who feed us and our students aren’t being properly trained, respected, or even paid their wages.

We’re not alone at LMU, of course, as the AAUP national has told us: real wages for faculty nation-wide have dropped, on average, by 5% for full-time faculty over the last year. 

And all the while, university administrators and the board of trustees keep giving themselves raises, promotions, and (apparently now) mansions. 

It’s always austerity for us, and luxury for them. 

Our scrappy little chapter of the AAUP is young, and we’re still building capacity. But the faculty have always been and will always remain the heart of LMU.

Together with amazing support staff and students—who are fighting hard again and again for equity and justice—we can build a more democratic workplace, untied across colleges, faculty ranks, and contracts: we are one faculty. 

So, let’s get together and talk about what we can do to become more united, and how we can build alongside students and staff, for a genuinely democratic and powerfully united LMU: 

LMU-AAUP General Assembly Meeting, Thursday Nov. 10, 2022 at 4pm (w/ reception to follow)

General Assembly Meetings are open to current AAUP members as well as non-member faculty and staff (who currently do not hold primarily administrative appointments). Join us for an open conversation on the economic status of the faculty at LMU, and brainstorm how we build capacity, and where we go next. 

Agenda and location details forthcoming!