January 19th, 2026 Update
Impasse hearing recordings are now available! For your convenience, we are providing an abridged recording that does not include prehearing business or two breaks taken form the proceedings.. You can can also watch the full recording, which includes prehearing business and the two breaks from the proceedings.
January 14th, 2026 Update
A huge Thank You to the 70 (+50) bargaining unit members who showed up in person (or remotely) to Impasse hearing relating to PTR, grievance resolution and other topics on Jan 8. It was electric, and included several thoughtful faculty testimonies (thank you!). Read about it here (ignore the photo). Post-hearing briefs are due to be submitted 30 days from January 8th and a decision from the special magistrate is expected 30 days after that.
December 4th, 2025 Update
Impasse declaration does not halt bargaining as explained below in this post.
Consequently, the parties have continued bargaining and have in fact tentatively agreed on four additional articles since the original date of this post, including Articles 8 (Uf Regulations and Policies), 11 (Nondiscrimination), 27 (Disciplinary Action and Job Abandonment) and 99 (Investigations). Bargaining continues actively on Articles 18 (Faculty Member Performance Evaluations and Evaluation File), 23 (Other Faculty Member Rights), 26 (Outside Activity and Conflict of Interest) and 28 (Grievance Procedure and Arbitration).
Everything You Need to Know About Impasse
What you need to know (TL;DR version)
Do you only have a few seconds to catch up on news regarding your union? Here’s what you need to know. The BoT has declared impasse in negotiations towards the successor CBA.
There is no reason to panic, as the current contract will remain unchanged during this process. UF faces stiff legal penalties if they seek to change your working conditions prior to the end of impasse. UF already faces penalties for two such changes, namely UF’s implementation of post-tenure review (PTR) and the arbitration ban (detailed below), which UF claims to be mandated by law, and which your union has formally disputed in a variety of legal challenges.
Your union always has believed, and continues to believe, in good faith bargaining. The parties are expected to continue bargaining through the impasse resolution process and your union believes bargaining can still converge to a mutually agreeable ratification of the next CBA. However, the impasse process as a whole presents important opportunities for faculty both to organize and highlight the issues of academic freedom and shared governance at the heart of this dispute.
The big picture
As you likely know, the UFF-UF Bargaining Team and representatives of the BoT have been negotiating a new version of your CBA since at least July 2024. The CBA is the legal document that governs your working conditions as a UF faculty member.
Until earlier this month, these negotiations were proceeding successfully. We had, for instance, ratified two rounds of salary raises (4% merit in 2024 and 3% merit 2025). We had also ratified two memoranda of understanding, including one mitigating impacts of federal grant cancellations on faculty. In fact, we had tentatively agreed upon 26 of the 35 articles of the successor CBA. And, in all of these agreements, UFF-UF improved or retained our position as reported in previous newsletters.
After concluding negotiations on these 26 articles, we were left with only 9 articles containing points of contention related to:
- The PTR statute
- The arbitration ban statute (3 articles)
- Unilateral changes to the CBA that the BoT believes are mandated
- Due process during investigations of faculty
- Conflict of interest policies governing faculty outside activities
- Release time for core union work by faculty volunteers
- Past practices governing faculty use of campus facilities
Before you read any further, we repeat that this development is no reason to panic. While we collectively navigate the impasse process – which we’ll describe in detail below – the current CBA will remain in full force. And, in the unlikely event that the Board of Trustees further violates the current CBA and imposes an alternative set of working conditions, they will be subject to legal penalties for “unfair labor practices (ULP).”
Just as importantly, UFF-UF and the BoT have already agreed to large parts of the new CBA – meaning that most of what the Board of Trustees might take the risk of imposing prior to the resolution of impasse either:
- Is amenable to both UF faculty and the UF administration
- Has already, like PTR and arbitration ban, been imposed and is currently subject to legal challenges and penalties
In fact, at least 5 legal complaints by our chapter, statewide UFF, or others concerning PTR and the arbitration ban are currently before federal and state judges and arbitrators.
What is impasse?
At this point, you might be wondering what the word “impasse” refers to.
Impasse is a process for resolving contract disputes when representatives of unionized workers and their bosses fail to reach an agreement in contract negotiations.
Unfortunately, impasse is not an impartial process. As you might expect – especially if you’re a union member or sympathetic to organized labor – impasse favors the employer.
After one party declares impasse, both the union’s representatives and those of the employer go before a legal official known as a special magistrate and, in an impasse hearing, make a case for the legal validity of their respective negotiating positions. At the end of this hearing, the special magistrate issues a decision as to which of the two parties’ arguments is stronger.
However, for Florida public employers, the special magistrate’s decision is not binding. It is the “legislative body” that ultimately decides the contract dispute, which in this case turns out to be BoT, i.e., the employer! Hence, in practice, impasse ends, not with the special magistrate’s ruling, but rather with the BoT’s version of the CBA offered to the bargaining unit for ratification. And if the bargaining unit does not ratify it, the BoT unilaterally “imposes” its version of the CBA.
Impasse, in short, is a conflict-resolution process in which the BoT can legally always get their way.
So why doesn’t the BoT always immediately declare impasse?
Given the information above, you might now be wondering why – if impasse is so favorable to the employer – the BoT does not simply declare impasse at the beginning of negotiations and impose their desired CBA straight away.
First, the law requires that contract negotiations take place in good faith. Neither party, therefore, can legally declare impasse without first having, in good faith, exhausted their negotiating options.
Second (more importantly), employers are subject to legal penalties – again in the form ULPs – for taking what are known as “waivers” to impasse, and ultimately for imposing them even after impasse resolution. (As mentioned earlier, unilateral imposition – even without waivers – prior to impasse resolution would incur a further ULP).
The word “waivers” describes instances in which employers arrogate to themselves rights that, under federal and/or state labor law, rightly belong to employees and their union representatives. For our purposes, these waivers take three main forms:
- Management discretion: Not surprisingly, employers want to preserve as much managerial discretion and freedom of action for themselves as possible. Unfortunately for them, federal and state labor law dictates that all terms and conditions of employment – meaning, basically, everything you do at work – are subject to union negotiation.
- Responses to legislation: Just as unsurprisingly, employers want to enact their interpretation of the state law as quickly as possible when doing so aligns with their interests and desires – as it does, for instance, in the case of the state-mandated PTR process. Unfortunately for them (once again!), federal courts have now repeatedly reaffirmed that state law cannot impair an existing contract unless doing so serves a compelling public good. And, more to the point, many of the state laws that the BoT seeks to impose are currently subject to credible constitutional challenges that, if successful, will render these laws null and void. Finally, and most importantly, BoT interprets these laws in a manner that arrogates more power and discretion to itself than is required by the law.
- Other permissive subjects: There are topics that the parties are not mandated to bargain, but which the BoT insists upon all the way to impasse.
In the case of the current contract, the UF BoT is insisting on taking waivers of all three varieties to impasse. You can see the details of the waivers and UFF’s positions here.
In the interest of concision, we won’t belabor the specific waivers that the BoT is taking to impasse. Instead, we’ll simply say the following:
- All of these waivers could result in punishing legal penalties for the BoT
- Our core disputes with the BoT, vis-à-vis the second category of waiver, center on Articles 18 and 28, while others are simply caught in the crossfire (i.e. contested contract language in the latter articles hinges on contested contract language in the former articles)
- The most motivated readers should consult our previous newsletters to better understand the issues of law and principle at stake in our disputes over Articles 18 and 28
These issues, as you might anticipate, are the same ones at stake in at least five prior / ongoing legal disputes over PTR and what we typically refer to as the “arbitration ban.” Currently, there are decisions pending on two constitutional challenges of the arbitration ban, one in federal and one in state court; two state challenges of PTR, and a chapter grievance on PTR, in addition to a case involving several faculty adversely affected by PTR, the arbitration ban, or both.
Naturally, your union’s position in impasse will depend on how the judges rule on these cases. As it turns out, the most pressing issues in law, education, and governance get litigated, again and again, in a variety of settings.
Where do we stand and where do we go?
If the impasse process proceeds as it should, the BoT should adhere to all of the tentative agreements we’ve previously reached, as well as any other provisions that are not under contention at the time the impasse was declared. While going back on such provisions is technically legal, it nevertheless represents a gross violation of the trust and good faith on which negotiations depend.
Moreover, during the impasse process, both parties are expected to continue negotiating. For our part, we are eager to do so, especially on those articles – especially Article 26 (conflict of interest) and 23 (faculty member use of campus facilities) – where we believe both parties can very soon reach a mutually satisfactory solution.
As we prepare for the impasse process, however, we will also be organizing. While impasse, as we argued above, is a process that favors the employer, it is also an opportunity to broadcast our demands beyond the bargaining table and receive feedback from an impartial, third-party authority.
In the case of our current negotiations, we believe our demands are eminently reasonable and eminently just.
We hold that, before we codify dubiously-legal state laws in our CBA, we should first wait for a definitive constitutional ruling from the relevant courts. We hold that union officers should, in exchange for their hundreds of hours of university service, be excused from a small portion of their teaching duties. We hold that faculty should have a democratic, legally-binding voice in any process that threatens their job and career. And we hold that faculty should have recourse to an impartial arbitrator when facing discipline or termination.
When all is said and done, these are the issues at stake as we embark upon the impasse process.
In collective bargaining, your union represents the vast majority of the bargaining unit. If you agree with your union’s positions, we encourage you to stand up and fight. Impasse is, like any dispute resolution process, a show of power in numbers as well as ideas. Both at UF and in other unionized workplaces, the workers who stand up and voice their opinion during impasse tend to reap the greatest benefits, whereas those who stand idly by wind up with a weaker contract and fewer rights.
Let’s be the former, not the latter.