Bargaining Blog 6/16/26

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 been denied promotion. A small proposed alteration that management accepted was that librarians was that librarians seeking promotion would no longer need to acquire performance evaluations from previous employers. The parts of our proposal that they discarded concerned feedback for librarians who were promoted, a more transparent metric for promotion, and the composition of the Peer Review Committee (PRC). Management maintains that it is fair for members of the executive committee to participate on the PRC as they are doing so only in a position of expertise, and not as management. (This last point led to a rather tense exchange about the presence or absence of power dynamics and the effect these dynamics have on open discussions.) They also added new language that decisions related to librarian promotion are not grievable. 

Management flatly rejected our proposal for staff promotion. They argued that longevity pay increases are sufficient and that they are not interested in creating new positions that may not be necessary.     

Needless to say, the bargaining committee was not happy with the majority of this counterproposal.

There were three tentative agreements: articles on layoff and furlough, flexible work and non-discrimination. There are some wins for the bargaining unit here, including:

  • an increased time-period for notifying the union of impending layoffs or furloughs, from 21 to 30 days
  • limitations on the denial of flexible work proposals
  • a longer and more specific list of protected categories. 

Given management’s response to our promotion proposals, you will be hearing from your colleagues on the committee to enlist your testimony. Our next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, July 8 from 12:30-4:30 PM, so if you have thoughts about how the promotion process works for you, or how much it would mean to even have the chance to be promoted if you’re a staff member, please speak up! We’d like to provide as much evidence as possible of how the current system leads to stagnation and dissatisfaction. 
    
 

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