After a productive fifth session, GEO met with the UIC administration for the sixth bargaining session of this contract cycle. As always, we especially want to shout out the members who attended this session after a busy holiday weekend. Several members in the caucus room were able to offer their perspective, which directly helped the bargaining team with responses to the university during the session. It is critical that members show up so that your voices are heard, and you can contribute to what we fight for, together!
At the beginning of the session, we presented our counter-proposal for Discipline and Dismissal, which the bargaining team worked on after our productive caucus with our members during the last session. We accepted many of the university’s changes, but still wanted to keep some of the original language that we had passed in our initial proposal. We gave the University some more explanation as to our changes and allowed the university to take it to their caucus.
Before breaking out into caucus rooms, we asked the University if they had a counterproposal to give us on our Leaves and Holidays proposal. After a quick 5 minutes to allow them to give us the counter-proposal so our caucus sessions were more productive, they presented us with their Leaves and Holidays counterproposal. What they gave us was quite frankly abysmal and insulting, which was validated by the anger members shared in our caucus. The University offered us a measly 3 weeks of parental leave, half of what we should get under their own policy alone. They outright rejected our request for more sick leave. Even amidst a global pandemic that has left over half a million people dead in the U.S. alone, they claim we do not need more sick days. On the same lines, they rejected and did not even acknowledge our attempt to get language that during any local/state/or federal medical emergency, GEO and the university will be able to negotiate for additional paid sick and parental leave. They only accepted two minor changes that we made in our initial proposal: they agreed to increase bereavement leave from 3 days to 5 days, which is the bare minimum, consistent with UIC policy. They accepted our language stating that supervisors should not discourage employees from using sick time. However, they did not extend this language towards using personal days, even though members shared testimonials last week about how they were discouraged from using their personal day by supervisors despite this being a contractual guarantee that we receive one personal day without fear of retaliation or questioning. They also rejected our language expanding the circumstances under which employees can take bereavement leave, which represents the university’s failure to recognize that relationships beyond that of the nuclear family can be just as significant and devastating whereas the union’s position argues that employees deserve to take bereavement leave for whomever is close to them.
We caucused for the majority of the bargaining session. Many members voiced their anger and frustration with what the administration counter-proposed. Although some members mentioned that they didn’t usually need all the sick leave we are contractually given, they did note that this is because they are privileged enough to not have a chronic illness and misses the significance that the COVID-19 pandemic had on members . The membership in the room was clear—we need more sick leave in order to protect our members who are most vulnerable, and because our time to treatment can be so long within the UI Health confines (especially for mental healthcare). We collectively agreed in the room that we would stand firm with the additional paid leave that we are requesting. What the university handed back to us was egregious and not even close to what our members need.
When we came back to the main session, both GEO and the administration presented our counter-proposals with the little time we had left. GEO agreed to take the Discipline and Dismissal counter-proposal, which we think we will be able to TA (tentatively agree) next session, and present it at the next bargaining session. GEO presented a counterproposal on Leaves and Holidays which made minor changes to the bereavement leave language, spelling out more clearly who employees can take bereavement for, a movement in good faith towards what the university passed to us. The University also passed us all their non-economic proposals of all the non-economic articles remaining to “get them on the table”. GEO did not have time to go through, but essentially what they gave us was proposals filled with no changes. GEO is taking these under consideration, but GEO maintains that we will pass proposals when we are ready to, and when we can have more of our membership in the room to assess what members want in our next contract. Because of this latter point, it is vital that members continue to show up in droves to our sessions-we need to hear your thoughts and your concerns! We need to organize together. Our next session will be July 20th, from 1-3pm Central Time via Zoom.
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