UIC and GEO returned to the table last Friday, February 13. In line with the proposal passed at the Special Membership Meeting last month, we formally requested mediation at this session. Mediation involves bringing in a third party that tries to help us communicate with UIC and explore solutions to reach a mutually acceptable agreement. This service can be provided by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), or a private mediator can be hired. The mediator facilitates discussion and offers fresh perspectives but does not impose a decision, leaving the final decision making power to us and UIC. Entering mediation is routine, and in fact is a requirement for further escalation, such as a strike vote.
We also exchanged proposals on the following articles. GEO put forward:
Hours of Work and Class Size, where we again try to prevent the overworking of grad workers, as well as provide a sufficient FTE for instructors of record and possible remedies when it is clear the worker does not have sufficient time or support to complete their work duties.
Entire Agreement, where a tentative agreement has now been reached. This article simply establishes in legal terms that this is the complete and final agreement between the university and the union, replacing all prior discussions and past practices. While it can only be changed through mutual agreement, neither side can be forced to negotiate over any topics already covered in it during the term of the agreement.
The University put forward:
Academic Labor Protections, where they outright rejected our attempts to better protect the intellectual property of workers and try to provide a better work-class-life balance, without any counterproposal.
Management rights and Grievance Procedure as a package. They are saying that they will accept our expansion of the timeframe to file a grievance if we in turn accept their proposal for management rights, which rejected attempts to prevent federal overreach and included language that further expands the university’s managerial powers.
UIC also brought to our attention that shifting our wages proposal from a 12 month to 9 month appointment functionally increased our yearly wage ask, even though this was not our intention. This will be corrected in the following session. While bringing this to our attention, they also rejected our attempt to protect workers from out of control inflation by having an additional wage increase kick in if inflation passed a certain threshold. However, they did show willingness to possibly adjust the payment schedule to twice monthly.
Make sure to stay updated on when the next bargaining session will be by checking the weekly bulletin on Mondays, and looking at our event calendar!
See you at the next session,
Your Contract Bargaining Committee