Bargaining on Friday last week resumed, we came to negotiations with eight proposals for the administration, including five new ones! Here they are:
- Recognition. This defines who is eligible to be in the union, and who is not.
- We emphasized the importance of including fellows in our unit. We know fellows go in and out of our unit, as it is currently defined, and excluding them would make people doing the same work having different rights based on their funding source, which is unacceptable.
- From the beginning, we have wanted fellows to be a part of our union, and we will not settle for less.
- Note: We were forced to exclude fellows at the hearings for our election due to an NLRB decision excluding them at MIT (a decision that has been appealed to the national level). We are hopeful the admins will do the right thing and recognize ALL our contributions to the universities success, and recognize the fellows as equals.
- Professional Development. We asked for a standing fund to be used to pay for training, conferences or other materials we may need to help advance us in our careers.
- Union Security. This proposal ensures all workers pay their fair share in maintaining and enforcing our contract in the form of dues. This is vital to ensuring the university cannot choose to simply ignore our contract once we finalize it.
- Union Access and Rights. This proposal requires admins to regularly provide us with a list of workers so we can reach out to educate them on their contract, explain to them the process for ensuring the contract is followed for them, and help them in the event the contract is violated. Additionally, it ensures no one is missing, and we have access we need to enforce our contract and speak to each other.
- Responses to Admin Proposals: These proposals were responses to the Administrations last proposal, hopefully getting us closer to agreement on these articles: Employment Records, Severability, Successorship, and Labor Management Committee.
Overall, we felt good about our presentation to the administration, and emphasized the importance of each of these articles. Ultimately, the administration’s response was disrespectful and disappointing. They emphasized that if we “had more realistic expectations” and stopped asking for basic rights and protections, we would be much closer to being completed.
However, we have seen in their “comprehensive packages” that they have an unrealistic expectation of where this is going to go. In their proposal, they include: “The University retains the exclusive rights that it possessed before the election of the Union as the exclusive bargaining representative” essentially saying, they want to be able to pretend we do not have a union.
We cannot, in good faith, accept such a proposal. Until the administration is willing to give us the respect we deserve for our contribution to the success of the administration, it’s going to be difficult to find common ground. Our hope is that, as we get further into the process, the administration will find more realistic expectations and come to the table with serious proposals that we can give serious consideration.
Our next bargaining session is June 18th. We will let you know more once we get closer!
In solidarity,
GENU-UAW Bargaining Committee