NULWU blog

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...