Contract Bargaining 9.8.22



Last week, the NULWU bargaining committee delivered a welcome letter and local Evanston treats to the new Dean of Libraries, Xuemao Wang, inviting him to attend this week’s bargaining session and meet the committee. We are happy to report that Dean Wang accepted our invitation and attended the opening of Thursday’s bargaining session, providing some remarks before members of the bargaining committee introduced themselves. While he did not stay for the actual bargaining session, we thank Dean Wang for his time and attention and look forward to working with him this academic year as he settles into his role at the Libraries and University.

We then announced tentative agreements on three clauses: No Strikes, No Lockout; Severability; and Equal Employment Opportunity Policies. We are especially excited to report the positive progress and tentative agreement on the No Strikes, No Lockout clause which will allow our members to demonstrate support for other labor groups on campus during non-work hours, such as lunch breaks and after work. We bargained long and hard on this issue and are proud to have come to a tentative agreement with the University which will allow us to support and show solidarity with all of our colleagues across campus!

We then presented two counter-proposals on the issues of Management Rights and Layoffs and Furloughs. Much of the University’s language in the Management Rights proposal was acceptable, but in order to better serve library workers, we want to ensure that we are all given adequate notice of job status changes. For the Layoffs and Furloughs proposal, to help the University understand how “job creep” has affected us over the years, several members of the bargaining committee then shared personal stories—their own and on behalf of colleagues. We feel it was very important for the University to hear these stories as austerity, layoffs, retirements, and attrition have deeply impacted the amount of work many library workers end up taking on without any extra compensation or equitable adjustment to job duties. We believe the University heard us on this issue and while we weren’t able to come to a tentative agreement in this session, we are hopeful that the stories members shared with us will bring the result we need for better working conditions and reasonable job duties.

The remainder of the session was spent in caucus. There will be no bargaining sessions for the next few weeks, but your bargaining committee will still be hard at work drafting our economic proposals. Please stay tuned for more communication from us—we want to hear from you and need your help to have the strongest possible contract!

As always, we ask that you continue to show your support for our union by wearing buttons and changing Zoom backgrounds to our union logo. The stronger the union, the better the contract! Make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to keep up with the latest updates.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog 8/19/23

It’s been a long time coming! We have a contract! On Thursday, 91% of our union membership voted to ratify our first contract!!! We are thrilled to be here after three years of organizing. The contract has many wins that meet our bargaining priorities: Raises Across the Board Protect Our Benefits Path to Promotion Invest in Our Development Transparency, Equity, and a Voice Wins include: Raises for everyone! The first year everyone will get a 3.75% raise OR the minimum salary of their rank, whichever is higher. We will get 3% raises in Years 2 and 3 of the contract Non-librarians will be eligible for longevity raises based on their years of service: 1% at 5 years, 1.5% at 10 years, 2% at 15 years, and 2.5% at 20 years. Librarian rank and promotion! We will have three ranks for librarians: Assistant, Associate, and Senior. The ranks will have salary minimums the first year of $70k for Assistant, $80k for Associate, and $90k for Senior. Librarians will start applying for promotion in the
Read more

Bargaining Blog 7.31.23

We are very happy to announce that we have come to a tentative agreement on our first contract! Since our last bargaining session, we reached an agreement on the two remaining proposals, Compensation and Librarian Promotion.  For Compensation, we agreed that: Our salary floors for each position will be increased by at least 5% for every title, with some above 20%! For the first year of the contract, everyone will either receive a 3.75% increase, or the new salary floor, whichever is greater. Everyone will receive a 3% increase for the second and third years of the contract Non-librarian staff will receive percentage-based longevity raises at 5, 10, 15 and 20 years  For Librarian Promotion, we agreed that: Entry-level librarians will start at Assistant Librarian, and can get promoted to Associate Librarian after 5 years, and Senior Librarian 5 years after that We are promoted based on job performance, research and scholarly contributions, and service to the profession and university; we
Read more

Contract Bargaining Update #1: Bargaining Begins Next Week!

The NULWU bargaining team is ready for our first session with Northwestern next week! It is incredibly exciting to reach this moment, especially because the unionization effort at the Library began two years ago this month. The end goal of this effort is to have a contract in place, and we are finally at the point where we are ready to bargain our first one! A lot has happened since we won our election in December. We’ve asked members about their priorities for our first contract, had several all-union meetings, formed a bargaining team, and met many times to develop our proposals. Who is the bargaining team? We are NULWU members representing non-exempt staff, exempt staff, and librarians across NUL. We represent different workgroups including Access Services, Instruction & Curriculum Support, Preservation, and many more. Every member of the team either volunteered or was nominated by another colleague in the bargaining unit. Our reasons for joining are unique, but what we share i
Read more