On Thursday we met with the university administration for our tenth bargaining session, and our first bargaining session of the Fall semester! If you missed previous bargaining sessions, please find those updates here. As we begin Fall semester, it is more crucial than ever that we get members coming to our bargaining sessions, as we bring more and more important articles to the table. First, we asked if the university had a response on employee rights for us. They did, and brought language for us regarding TA’s and GA’s recording themselves, but are still rejecting the rest of the language on guaranteeing internet access and other materials required for remote work. We broke out into our caucus rooms to discuss what the administration sent back to us, and to discuss the Appointment Terms article that we were prepared to pass back. After discussing with our members, we were still concerned that there was no language barring that we be required to record ourselves as a condition of employment, but we heard some of the university’s concerns about recording for students who needed accommodations and incorporated that into our new language. We came back and presented another Employee Rights proposal where we maintain that we will not be required to record as a condition of our employment except as required by law in order to support accommodations.
The University took our Employee Rights proposal back into a caucus. In our caucus room, we went over Appointment Terms with the members who were there in order to explain what we would be passing to the university later on in the session. We had a great discussion with members about why a nine-month appointment structure would make our employment not only more secure, but our livelihoods astronomically better financially, mentally, and physically. We believe this also would help the university who had concerns with giving us more paid parental leave; on a nine-month appointment vs. a semester appointment, taking the 10 weeks of paid parental leave that we have presented would be much easier for departments to plan around rather than a semester-by-semester appointment structure.
When we came back from our caucus rooms, the university was still not amenable to what we passed back. One department head said that we are in a “new reality” of teaching in which assistants should expect to record themselves. Many members spoke at length about why recording should not be required as a condition of our employment, specifically because many of us deal with sensitive topics in our classroom that would be a violation of student trust to record. Our classes would not be as pedagogically sound if we started recording these sessions, as students may fear to discuss things more openly. We are still working with the counterproposal that the administration gave us and will hope to bring our own counter next session.
After this productive discussion, we presented our Appointment Terms proposal, which included a modest compensation to grads who receive late/last-minute appointments (which our sister union at UIUC has in their contract, thus there is no basis for us to not be given the same compensation), a guarantee that graduate and teaching assistants will be given a nine month appointment instead of a semester-by-semester appointment (except in special cases/circumstances as elected by the assistant), and language that workers will not be evicted from residence halls/university housing during a local, state, or national emergency. This last point was something we won through impact bargaining that we believe is important to enshrine in the contract in order to protect workers in the future. The majority of the remainder of the session was spent in our caucus rooms, where we also asked the university if they had a response to our Leaves and Holidays counterproposal that we had passed back to them last session in addition to the Appointment Terms proposal. Near the end of the session, they came back and seemed dismayed that we had made any changes to the Appointment Terms article. Their lead negotiator in particular expressed disdain that we were trying to make changes after all the work we had done on it during the last contract cycle. We fought hard during a nearly 3-week strike for what we won in our last contract, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to fight hard for even greater protections and job security for grad workers. All in all, the university rejected completely our Appointment Terms proposal, not offering any counter, and they said that they would aim to come back to our next session with a new Leaves and Holidays counterproposal after GEO sent them information on paid leave for graduate workers at several other peer institutions (all of which have much more leave than UIC’s current measly offer of 3 weeks).
We expect to continue discussing these issues as we proceed through bargaining. As we start passing our most key proposals and move close to passing our economics proposal, it is key that members show up to these sessions. We win the best contract when all of us are there, showing up, and collectively organizing around the issues that are important to us. There has never been a more important time to be involved and a card-signed member of the union. Our next session will be Friday, September 17th from 11:00am-2:00pm Central Time via Zoom. You don’t have to be there the whole time, just pop in when you can!
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