Dear members,
Last Thursday, April 25th, we had our sixth bargaining session. After a contentious semester of meetings with the administration, we are happy to say that the last bargaining session was productive. We believe this is due in part to your work as a unit — signing bargaining petitions, showing up to organizing meetings and contract action teams. The BC’s efforts to push through the filibustering nonsense from the University is made more successful because of our growing power in numbers. We must keep up this great work.
In the last session we passed three articles across the table: V-CAP, EAP, and Travel.
- V-CAP handles the processing of voluntary donations to the union for UAW’s political action committee that represents unit members at the table when politicians ask the UAW for endorsements. Having a strong Community Action Program guarantees we have politicians who support labor like the UAW endorsed city councilors who helped pass our local government resolutions supporting our election campaign last year.
- EAPÂ guarantees our members access to the same Employee Assistantship Program that all Northeastern Employees have access to and we demanded minimum standards at the table for any existing EAP.
- We were very excited to have passed an article on Graduate Student Worker Travel. We proposed to instate travel advances, insisted that reimbursements be made to GSW’s within fourteen (14) days of receipt of an expense report, and are pushing the administration to pay for registration fees and other anticipated expenses ahead of time.
We also were able to have a productive conversation about a counter proposal the school made and expect imminent movement on our Job Postings Board and Employee Records. Check out our work on our article tracker available online here.
We are disappointed to say that we were not able to get Northeastern to honor their commitment, made at the start of bargaining, to work with us to resolve an impending crisis on campus. As many of us are aware, some of our fellow grads are being pushed out of their funded positions by arbitrary applications of unstated policies introduced after our election. In at least one example, the CSSH department is disallowing funding for a Student Worker in their sixth year and citing a “pandemic policy” graduate workers never knew was in existence. It doesn’t matter to CSSH that the worker’s advisor has funding available, and wants to work with the employee being pushed out as they finalize their dissertation. We have reason to suspect this is due to political disagreements between the student and department chair, but they are not the only CSSH worker Northeastern has pushed out due to this sudden, post-election policy change rescinding funding from workers in their fifth years and beyond.
Please let Kellee Tsai know how this makes you feel. Her front desk number is 617.373.5173.
What can you do, fellow worker?
- Sign our petition demanding this pace continue at the table.
- Reply to this email or fill out this form and let us know you want to help out more!
- Join our Organizing Committee Meetings and sign up to be a part of changing this campus for the better today and building a community that lasts forever.
In Solidarity,
The GENU-UAW Bargaining Committee