NULWU blog

 We had another bargaining session with management on Thursday, July 30. The session began with them asking us questions on our parental leave proposal. They then caucused for over two hours.  Afterwards, with only an hour left in the session, they came back and hastily presented counterproposals on librarian faculty promotion, bereavement, holidays, neonatal intensive care leave, and compensation. They also presented a proposal to clarify some language in our existing extended sick time article, as well as a new proposal on job classifications for staff. While some of these proposals are reasonable, we continue to disagree on major points in others.  For example, they did not present a counterproposal on staff promotion, opting instead to introduce a separate proposal on new or changed classifications. This proposal fails to take into account the high qualifications of many people in staff positions throughout the Libraries. It is particularly frustrating in light of how...

We met with management on Wednesday, July 8th for bargaining. The session began with management responding to our previous proposals on AI, bargaining unit work, steward time, and job titles in the union. We’ve been going back and forth on a couple of these, and they’ve rejected them yet again. We then presented our counterproposals for staff and faculty promotions, starting with re-introducing the staff promotion proposal. We stated our goals for the proposal, and one by one, the present members of the bargaining committee read the testimonials sent to us by staff, with one staff member coming in person on PTO to read their own. The testimonials were impactful and illustrated that there is a widespread need for staff promotion opportunities across the Libraries. We greatly appreciate everyone for taking time and energy to write and share their experiences with us. We also presented our revised counterproposal for faculty promotion, making slight changes in response to comments from ma...

On Tuesday, June 16, the bargaining committee met for a fifth time with management. The session consisted largely of a discussion on librarian and staff promotion. It began with management providing a lengthy counterproposal on promotions; this was followed by a lengthy discussion among the bargaining committee in caucus. We then reconvened with management to clarify certain points. Here followed another, briefer caucus and then, upon having everyone in the room again, some tentative agreements were made. Management did not respond to our proposals on AI, professional development, or several outstanding non-economic proposals. Management’s counterproposal for librarian promotions was largely a rejection of our proposal in favor of the language in the current contract, with some minor changes and one major regression. Management maintains that librarian promotion is working well, given that 19 librarians have been promoted; what they neglected to mention was that nine librarians have be...

 On Thursday June 4, we had our fourth bargaining session with management. This was a big one; we introduced two new major proposals and we came to 2 new Tentative Agreements (TAs).  Our TAs for this session covered: Discipline - Represented workers will now be informed of their right to have a union representative present at discipline-related meetings. Open Positions - If a represented worker’s position is reclassified, the resulting role does not need to be posted and that employee does not need to apply for their own job. If a vacancy occurs and Northwestern decides to fill that open position, the job will be posted and a search will be conducted. We began the session by presenting counterproposals on nondiscrimination, artificial intelligence, layoffs and furloughs, and flexible work arrangements.  Then, we presented two proposals that the bargaining committee has been working on for a long time. The first of these deals with librarian and staff job classification an...

 On Tuesday May 19, we had our third bargaining session with management. While we made significant movement towards agreement on some proposals, we continue to disagree on others. We are still working on the non-economic proposals presented during our first and second bargaining sessions. In this session, we had multiple counterproposals to present on management rights, stewards, artificial intelligence, discipline, and open positions. Management rights include adding titles to the list of represented workers covered by the contract and defining who can do bargaining unit work and when. We are still redeveloping our proposals on equal employment opportunity and non-discrimination and will counter at our next session, on June 4. After our initial presentation, each side went into caucus for a very, very long time… Half an hour before bargaining was due to end, management returned and hastily presented their counterproposals. They countered on flexible work strategies, open positions...

On Tuesday, May 5, we had our second bargaining session which resulted in our first Tentative Agreements (TAs)! As a reminder, a TA means that we have reached a consensus on proposals between the NULWU bargaining committee and the NU Administration; but these are not officially approved until after our union members vote on and ratify our contract. Our TAs for this session covered: Union Rights - we ensured that the Union can utilize the Forum Room for meetings  Grievance and Arbitration - if more than one Represented Worker files on the same issue simultaneously, we can now expedite the grievance process  Our bargaining session began with NU Administration responding to the 12 proposals we introduced at our first session on April 14. They provided five counter-proposals to our original twelve, two of which resulted in our TAs listed above. Although they rejected the other seven of our original proposals, they did seem willing to engage in further conversation around these iss...