This Tuesday, our Bargaining Committee met with Northeastern Administration once again and passed four new proposals and three responses to the University’s previous proposals. Here’s what was passed:
- Paid Leave: While some forms of paid leave already exist informally, we’d like to formalize these terms so they will not be taken away in the course of our contract. Our proposal covers sick/personal leave, family/medical leave, bereavement (including for the loss of a pet), civic duty, and leave to attend proceedings for immigration.
- Family Benefits: Recognizing that grad school can take up a lot of our lives, we asked for adoption assistance, matching for contributions to a 529 college savings plan, accessible lactation spaces, and additional parental accommodations.
- Workload: We formalized the existing 20 hours per week workload for salaried graduate workers, and established procedures for contesting workload as well as additional pay for hours worked over the limit. Additionally, we asserted that all hourly workers should be paid for each hour they work, regardless of any cap in hours per semester.
- Parking and Transit: We asked for grad workers to have the choice between no-cost MBTA passes, parking passes, Blue Bikes memberships, or reimbursement for bicycle costs to be provided to all graduate workers upon request.
- Responses to Admin Proposals: We passed responses on Labor Management Committee, Professional Development, and Travel. We hope that these get us closer to agreement on these articles.
We received the following from admins:
Additionally, the University has continuously refused to work from our proposed language, which significantly impedes the negotiation process. The responses we got on Tuesday for our Union Access and Rights, Union Security, and Intellectual Property articles largely gutted our proposed language in favor of language that doesn’t address our needs as grad workers, and vague references to existing university policy. With limited time available in bargaining sessions to discuss reasoning for such changes, this type of practice is making it difficult to come to agreement on proposals, which we’d like to be able to do in a timely manner.
Another issue on Tuesday was one of professionalism. Scott Merill, the director of labor operations on Northeastern’s side once again verbally harassed and berated one of our bargaining committee members during the session, and we’re putting our foot down. We will not stand for this level of disrespect, and we’re informing the university negotiating team that we will walk out of the bargaining session if this behavior happens again.
Our next bargaining session will be on August 2nd at East Village 008 and on Zoom. We will send out more information once we have it! We hope to see you there!
In solidarity,
GENU-UAW Bargaining Committee