Yesterday, May 16th, we had our most recent bargaining session. As we move into the summer, the BC continues to propose important and innovative policies to ensure we receive adequate job training, protect our jobs from automation and automated monitoring, and secure and defend our intellectual property rights.

  • For Training, we proposed guaranteed pay for time spent in training, notification of training required, union supervision of mandatory training, consideration of recommended new training, and time off for professional licensing and other necessary training. All grad workers shouldn’t have to do work-mandated activities off the clock, nor should they be held back in their careers and programs through denied opportunities to take the exams required. University admin agreed that grad workers and the union should be able to propose new training to be covered by the University where we may need it to protect ourselves, our fellow workers, and others around us.
  • For Automation, we proposed forward-looking language to prevent grad workers from being automated out of a job or from having our work monitored by automated systems. We want to ensure that the University cannot use sensors like what happened in ISEC in Fall 2022 to track our movement or productivity, because we know that our work can’t be quantified by the number of hours we’re at a particular desk or the number of words we type per hour. Our work takes place in labs and classrooms, in the field and at conferences, all of which won’t show up on some IR sensor or in keystrokes. Additionally, we want to prevent classes from being automated away from grad workers through pre-made lectures and assignments through our prohibitions on digital replicas. As we see technology being used for these purposes in industries throughout the world, we want to ensure in this contract that we set the standard for future grad worker contracts and for our own future protection by presenting ground-breaking language in this space.
  • For Intellectual Property, we proposed expansive protections of our IP rights, where we own all the work we produce, whether that’s course materials, writing, devices, code, or art. The article also includes protection from retaliation if you pursue reclaiming your stolen work. When University administrators tried to refer us to an existing policy, they were unable to find an IP policy for graduate workers on their own website, making it overwhelmingly clear how opaque any current policy is for grad workers.

Following our discussions and critiques at the previous session, the University brought back edits to their own language around a Job Postings Board and Employee Records, which once again did not address our concerns or the language in our own proposals. Through questioning, they once again made apparent the inconsistencies present across their own systems, and as one observer put it, highlighted the University’s lasting “tech debt” around setting up the systems needed to access our own records and find employment opportunities. We continued to push them on their insistence at their lack of resources to make functional systems, and we will continue to fight for processes that work for us.

Your engagement in the bargaining process and across campus has helped move the process forward! By coming to bargaining sessions, talking to our fellow workers, and signing on to initiatives, we make our voices heard.

How can you keep us moving forward?

In Solidarity,

The GENU-UAW Bargaining Committee

Bargaining Session Update – 5/16/2024