Welcome back to the spring semester! We’re entering our 13th month in bargaining with the university for critical improvements, such as proposing a minimum $60k salary (minimum $57.67/hour for hourly workers), international worker protections, vision/dental insurance, transportation subsidies, and more. Our hard work as employees helps this non-profit university obtain its $2.6 billion in annual revenue and pay top-ranking administrators over $1 million salaries.
In these unprecedented political times, we need to secure a living wage and robust workplace protections. However, our proposals were scoffed at by the university’s negotiators as “asking for the sun and the moon,” during our most recent bargaining session. We need your support both inside and outside the bargaining room if we want the university to take our demands seriously. Showing up and making some noise is the best way to show how much you want this!
What can you do to help ensure that we win a strong contract?
- Observe Bargaining! Register to attend our next Bargaining Session on February 18th at 11AM-1PM in person (likely in RP or Curry, details announced soon) or over Zoom. We strongly encourage you to attend in person if you’re able!
- Participate in our union democracy and learn more about next steps to win this contract! RSVP to the next General Membership Meeting on Thursday, February 20th from 6-8PM in Dockser Hall 220.
- Get Involved! Reply to this email and organizers will reach out to talk about how you can help.
“Observing the bargaining session was an unwelcome reminder—made worse by the backdrop of the Trump administration—that without our union, grad student workers are completely uncared for by the university. Grad workers are taking voluntary time out of their lives to ask that the university offer us protections and pay us a living wage, while the university team is paid to sit across the table, dismiss our concerns, and waste our time.”
– Adina Gitomer, Network Science PhD GSW
We must negotiate a contract that the majority of grad workers will vote to accept. What the university has on the table offers less than the status quo and is unacceptable to all of us. We urged them to respond earnestly to the currently 26 outstanding articles that they have yet to address at the next bargaining session. Only then can we have direct and productive discussions on the topics that we value most. As the university continues stalling, dismissing, and disrespecting our community of workers on every single issue, we need to show them, collectively, that this is unacceptable to us.
In the session itself, the committee presented workplace-relevant counters and reassertions on International Worker Rights, Professional/Academic Freedom, Automation, AI, Travel, Professional Development, as well as some boilerplate articles on Voluntary Community Action Program and Successorship—two proposals that typically appear in most union contracts. The administration presented only Training and Employment Records. This lack of movement highlighted Northeastern’s disrespect for the workers that make this university run.
To demonstrate our urgency, we delivered a petition signed by more than 1,300 grad workers demanding a fair contract now. We want to emphasize that the petition we delivered shows that more than 1,300 graduate workers are tired of waiting.
In Solidarity,
GENU-UAW Bargaining Committee