HACC faculty members fail to reach contract agreement with strike looming

Close to 750 HACC professors and faculty members across south central Pennsylvania are ready to walk off the job after contract negotiations made little progress.

Professors and faculty members at Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC) are one step closer to walking off the job and going on strike after contract negotiations between HACC Education Association (HACCEA) and the school’s administration fell apart early Wednesday morning. 

Close to 200 professors, faculty members, students, and community members held a rally outside of the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex Tuesday evening and marched to negotiations with the hopes of finishing a contract. 

“ I’m hoping to get a draft of a contract that we can actually vote on to ratify. That is our goal tonight,” Amy Withrow, a HACC English professor and HACCEA chief negotiator, told reporters.

“ We’re not asking for the moon in this. We basically want to have fair compensation for the length of time that this is drawn on. It includes back pay for us. It also includes some policies that are in existence right now. That’s it. We’re not asking for a lot more than that. We just want some of those existing policies to go into our contract.”

HACC’s professors and faculty members voted to form a union in April 2022, and they have gone more than 40 months without a contract or a pay raise. 

During that time, HACC’s Board of Trustees approved multiple pay increases for employees at the school, but the professors and faculty members did not see any. 

“What was communicated to me about how negotiations have broken down, about how we have gotten this close to a strike was this,” State Rep. Ismail Smith-Wade-El (D-Lancaster) told the faculty members. 

“ Yes, it’s about the money. It’s about how much you are compensated, but really it’s about the disrespect of every other employee getting raises while you stand pat for three years because the administration wants to punish you for using your constitutional right to form a union.”

A spokesperson with the school claims that HACC is legally prohibited from providing salary increases to unionized faculty until a contract is finalized and doing so would violate status quo agreements and state labor law.

HACCEA members voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike earlier this month. They represent roughly 750 members who teach online or at their campuses in Adams, Dauphin, Lebanon, Lancaster, and York Counties. 

According to the union, the two sides reached agreements on intellectual property, department chairs, and status quo agreements on rank and promotion, but were not able to make significant progress to avert a strike. 

HACCEA has offered to return to the negotiating table over the next week, but they have not disclosed when a strike will occur.