We are excited to have had our first bargaining session this morning, bringing us one step closer to establishing a fair contract!
We were joined by national and regional UAW representatives who came to show their support for our efforts. From the University’s side we were joined by David LaChappelle (Director of Employee and Labor Relations), Matthew Lyford (Direct of Labor & Employee Relations), Anthony Imbalzano (Associate Dean, Office for Postdoctoral Scholars) and Allison Atwood (Sr. Labor Strategy Consultant). Both teams expressed a desire for the process to be positive, productive, and efficient. We highlighted last week’s “Fund our Future” Town Hall with federal and state legislators as an example of a constructive approach.
We started by introducing ourselves and speaking briefly about our backgrounds and research. We then presented UMass with our Initial Bargaining Goals, which a majority of postdocs voted to ratify last month by 99.3%, and explained why each goal is a priority for our first contract. Next, we discussed bargaining logistics and scheduling. We are glad to report that we have scheduled bargaining sessions through December. Our second session will be on Wednesday, October 29 from 1-4pm. We encourage postdocs to attend as an observer—click here to RSVP.
After we discussed scheduling, we presented three proposals to UMass. You can find our proposals on our bargaining tracker here, and a short summary of the proposals below:
- Union-Management Committee: creates a joint committee to meet regularly during the life of the contract on matters related to our contract
- Health and Safety: ensures that all postdocs have a safe and comfortable workspace and an appropriate environment that will make postdocs more productive
- Severability: protects the remainder of our contract if one part is declared unlawful, and ensure our right to bargain over any impacts
We also brought up the issue of our yearly, experience-based raises. Many of you have reached out to us with concerns about this issue, and we represented these concerns to UMass today. As many of you are aware, last year UMass implemented a policy that ties our salaries to NIH minimums. However, we did not receive our regular raises on October 1st of this year. UMass is required to maintain all policies during contract negotiations, including our regular raises, and we made clear to the administration that it would be unlawful for them to discontinue such regular raises during the negotiation process. After some discussion they confirmed that they would look into the issue.
If you want to hear more about our first bargaining session, please join us tonight at Greater Good Brewing Co. from 5:30pm-8:00pm. If you need or can provide a ride, please fill out the form here.
In solidarity,
Courtney Price, Systems Biology, Shank Lab
Dan Bollen, Department of Medicine, Pukkila-Worley Lab
Ivano Mocavini, Biochemistry and Molecular Biotechnology, Rando Lab
Karthika Nagalekshmi, Program in Molecular Medicine, Luban Lab
Brittany Rosener, Systems Biology, Mitchell Lab
CORE-UAW Postdoc Bargaining Committee