“Everyone in this room shares the goal of providing an excellent learning environment for our students”

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. I am Deborah Lyons, from the Department of French, Italian, and Classical Studies. I have been at Miami for 19 years and I want to echo what Professor Hall has just said: in all my years of teaching here and at a number of other institutions, I have never seen faculty morale as low as it is now at Miami.I know that many of you come from a business background. In a business context, when workers begin to organize a union, the usual reaction is to put up barriers, to try to stop the union. It was disappointing to see the university follow this playbook, hiring a high-priced union-busting law firm, and spending a lot of money that could have been used for education.

We are not making widgets. We are creating education, a public good. I know that everyone in this room shares the goal of providing an excellent learning environment for our students. If we were making widgets, management would want the workers to make as many widgets as possible as fast as possible. The workers would want to be paid as much as possible to make those widgets. This is not the case here. We all want the same thing. There is no reason for this to be an adversarial relationship. And business is not the best model for higher education.

The money spent on trying to stop the union is being wasted. It is a futile effort. We will win! Even if we are not allowed to go forward with our preferred unit composition, we will organize the excluded faculty, hold another election, and establish another bargaining unit. The union cannot be stopped.

Thank you for your time.