Today, our Bargaining Committee had our third bargaining session with the UMass Chan Administration. We are glad to announce that we reached tentative agreements on our Severability and Union-Management Committee articles. We hope to continue to keep this pace on reaching tentative agreements for articles to get a fair contract as soon as possible.
UMass also presented counterproposals on Employment Records and Grievance and Arbitration, and new proposals on a Probationary Period and Management Rights. We presented an additional article on Prayer and Meditation Space. Currently, only one such space is available in the medical school. However, this is far from many postdocs’ labs, and traveling to the medical school is not feasible for many postdocs in the middle of a busy work schedule. This article will provide a prayer space in each building where postdocs work. You can find all of the proposals and counterproposals on our bargaining tracker here.
As you may know, we recently filed a charge with the Department of Labor Relations regarding UMass Chan’s failure to provide us with scheduled pay increases. In this session the administration continued to delay providing these increases. We hope that the UMass administration will voluntarily and quickly resolve this issue, and if they don’t we are willing to continue to fight for our legal right to get the increases UMass Chan owes us.
Our next bargaining session is scheduled for November 24th from 10am-12pm. If you are interested in observing, please RSVP here. We will also be having a post-bargaining potluck! Please join us to learn about bargaining updates, and if you’re able to bring a dish to share, sign up 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