Today, our Bargaining Committee had our eighth bargaining session with the UMass Chan Administration.
We presented counterproposals on Workload, Discrimination and Harassment, and Sick Time. Both workload and sick time proposals were a counter to a previous article from UMass Chan, and we are close to an agreement on these articles. We also presented a discrimination and harassment article that reconciled two separate proposals written by us and the UMass administration. We re-emphasized key protections for disability rights and access, pregnancy and lactation-related accommodations, bathroom equity, and political speech.
UMass Chan passed us a counterproposal on Recognition (who is included in the Union), as well as new articles on Past Practices and Layoff Procedures. The language of this layoff article reneges on our previous agreement with the University, shortening the notice time that postdocs receive for layoffs. This kind of regression in our worker protections is not acceptable, and we will be pushing back on this.
Despite the language of some of the administration’s counterproposals, we’re pleased to have made some progress in the number of responses we’ve received, and hope that we will have more sessions with this sort of back and forth.
You can find all of the proposals and counterproposals on our bargaining tracker here.
Show your support for our fight for a fair contract now by coming to our next bargaining session on DATE—RSVP 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