9/12
In this session, we passed Health and Safety (with provisions for providing respirators, hand sanitizer, and air filters), Additional Employment (with provisions for grad workers to use materials created by them for outside employment), Training (with added language about trainings on dealing with federal law enforcement), and Appointment Terms (with several changes including language guaranteeing 12-month employment contracts and eliminating all fees for graduate workers). We received Work Rules and Access to Personnel File. At this session, we also were informed that after our pressure campaign, UIC dedicated to reinstate the wrongfully revoked CampusCare waiver, ensuring our workers would have significant portions of our healthcare costs waived by the university. This is proof that when we fight, we win! Going forward, we will continue to fight for no more fees, a better healthcare plan, and higher wages to ensure the cost of healthcare is less burdensome to our bargaining unit.
9/19
In this bargaining session with UIC, we passed over two proposals with tentative agreements (Electronic Availability of the Agreement and Access to Personnel File), as well as Recognition (with hopes to include fellows and grad hourlies as part of our unit), and a major proposal - healthcare. Here, we propose the university provide an alternative to CampusCare, which is not health insurance, but instead a “student health benefit” that is geographically limited, not suitable for families, and often comes with long wait times and limited provider selection. In this new healthcare plan, grad workers would have the option to use CampusCare, or the option to use a real health insurance plan with broader coverage, more availability of providers, and guaranteed coverage for a variety of healthcare including reproductive care, gender-affirming care, mental health care, dental, and vision coverage.
UIC passed back to us Health and Safety (with no movement on inclusion of respirators, hand sanitizer, or air filters) Training (with no movement on providing training and communication about federal law enforcement) and Additional Employment (with some movement on allowing grad workers to use their materials for outside employment). On the issue of training, we raised with the university that with increasing federal law enforcement presence in Chicago, especially ICE, grad workers as well as students felt unclear and like there was little communication or standardization on how to deal with federal law enforcement, and emphasized the importance of the entire community knowing their rights. We raised additional concerns about the university’s policies regarding what happens when campus community members are the subject of harassment and/or doxxing campaigns as a result of political speech, and were disappointed (though not necessarily surprised) that it seems the university does not have a standard policy for these increasingly common scenarios. We plan to continue pushing the university to be clear in communicating and protecting not only our rights, but the rights of all members of the UIC community.