NULWU blog

 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...