Bargaining Blog 3/14/23: A Piece of the Pi

Today was our first bargaining session after we shared economic proposals in January! These are the proposals that may cost the university money, such as wages, benefits, promotions, and professional development. Our last blog post detailed our economic bargaining priorities. Economics is an exciting step in the process, because it means we’re heading into the final phase of contract negotiations. It also means that we’ve successfully come to tentative agreements with the university on most of our non-economic proposals. We are still negotiating with the university on layoffs and COPE deductions, but we hope to settle those issues soon.


We’ll be honest with you, this bargaining session was disappointing, in part because the university refused to engage with our proposals on issues that we know are important to our members, such as path to promotion, rewarding longevity, making benefits for staff and librarians more similar, and flexible work strategies. Their counter to our wage proposal was underwhelming, with salary floors that do not meet the Cook County minimum living wage for many of our staff. We waited two months for the university to respond to this? That said, we’ve been here before with the university while bargaining non-economics. With support, and testimonials from our union members, we were able to move the university on issues that we know matter to our members. Now that the fight is getting harder, it is an important time to show your support for the union. Our contract negotiation ground rules guarantee that members of the bargaining unit are allowed to (on their own unpaid time) observe bargaining. With agreement from the university bargaining team, unit members can even speak at bargaining about the impact of proposals.


Furthermore, union members have legal protections that allow us to show our union pride without retaliation. We are allowed to wear buttons to show union support. We can speak about our support of our union or other unions on campus. We are also allowed to discuss our salaries. We can request and have a union representative with us at a meeting where discipline will be discussed (this is called Weingarten rights). If you need a representative or have any questions, please reach out to a member of the bargaining team. 

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