Bargaining Blog 7/8/26

We met with management on Wednesday, July 8th for bargaining. The session began with management responding to our previous proposals on AI, bargaining unit work, steward time, and job titles in the union. We’ve been going back and forth on a couple of these, and they’ve rejected them yet again.

We then presented our counterproposals for staff and faculty promotions, starting with re-introducing the staff promotion proposal. We stated our goals for the proposal, and one by one, the present members of the bargaining committee read the testimonials sent to us by staff, with one staff member coming in person on PTO to read their own. The testimonials were impactful and illustrated that there is a widespread need for staff promotion opportunities across the Libraries. We greatly appreciate everyone for taking time and energy to write and share their experiences with us. We also presented our revised counterproposal for faculty promotion, making slight changes in response to comments from management and pressing forward with the parts we felt were most important to keep.

We presented several economic proposals on longevity increases and adjustments to starting pay and yearly raises, and introduced proposals related to cost of living, health insurance, bereavement, holiday pay, parental leave, and neonatal intensive care leave.

Management took a lengthy caucus, during which we discussed potential responses to their rejections to the counterproposals reviewed at the beginning of the session. Without returning from their caucus, management notified us that they didn't have any counters for what we had presented and needed more time to put together a response. They suggested a date and time for our next bargaining session (Thursday, July 30 from 9-1), which we accepted. We asked if they could be available for any possible earlier dates, as September is not far off.

With that, we closed the meeting and left 1800 Sherman for the day.

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