Contract Bargaining Update: Second Session
Members of the bargaining committee and SEIU 73 representatives met yesterday with University representatives on Zoom from 9am-noon. This was our second bargaining session with the University, and it was a doozy! This session gave us our first taste of what it is like to submit a package of proposals, and see it returned to us with edits, amendments, and in some cases, outright rejection. This was disappointing to us, because we know that the issues addressed in the rejected proposals are very important to our members. However, based on the discussions at our virtual table, we are hopeful and will reintroduce these proposals so that we can engage in a robust conversation about why they are crucial to our members. And importantly, thanks to language that we introduced into our ground rules, we can invite members who are not part of the bargaining committee to come to bargaining sessions and speak about why these issues matter to them! Since the proposal package we submitted was fairly