Hello APA Members,

I wanted to provide you with a quick update on some recent APA events:

1. Members of the APA Executive Board and other members attended the MTA Annual Meeting of Delegates Friday and Saturday, April 26 and 27 in Springfield, MA and online. This meeting sets the annual budget for the MTA and addresses bylaw changes, resolutions, and new business items. Some items of note were the increase of the budget to add three new regional organizers (including one dedicated to Higher Education) and six new lead field representatives, one for each regional office and one for Higher Education (its own “region”). For reference, the MTA has regions A thru H, A thru G are K-12 locals, and H is all of higher education. This increase in staff will result in a $33 increase in MTA dues for each member for the next fiscal year. For our part, APA Delegates opposed this increase unanimously along with delegates from the MCCC, the community college union for faculty and staff, the largest higher education union.
2. The APA Executive Board and our MTA Field Representative have been working on our proposals for negotiations in preparation for negotiations. The APA Executive Board had our initial meeting with Management representatives to go over the ground rules, the rules for bargaining, how each side will conduct themselves, and how many meetings each side has to present new proposals. Please be sure to thank your Chapter Presidents that have stepped up and worked hard to draft these and listen to the issues at hand and strategized for hours on how to present these proposals. It has been a lot of work on top of their busy jobs. I hope you will join me in thanking them for their service and dedication to our union and improving our contract.
3. Our first bargaining session will be May 2nd at Worcester State University. We are hopeful for a productive meeting – with many proposals ready to go, we are hitting the ground running. This is all thanks to the feedback from our members, both from our surveys and from issues that our Chapter Presidents have brought to our attention. I will provide an update for everyone after that session.
4. Our silent representatives will be getting training from our former president and silent representative coordinator, Sherry Horeanopoulos. Thank you to everyone that has signed up for being a silent representative. I hope this effort to put more eyes and ears on our negotiating process will be helpful as we negotiate this contract now that we can negotiate language changes.

I wish you all a happy and stress-free commencement. Thank you for all you do for our students and campuses.

In solidarity,
Seth Bean, APA President