Bargaining Blog 7/30/26

 We had another bargaining session with management on Thursday, July 30. The session began with them asking us questions on our parental leave proposal. They then caucused for over two hours. 

Afterwards, with only an hour left in the session, they came back and hastily presented counterproposals on librarian faculty promotion, bereavement, holidays, neonatal intensive care leave, and compensation. They also presented a proposal to clarify some language in our existing extended sick time article, as well as a new proposal on job classifications for staff. While some of these proposals are reasonable, we continue to disagree on major points in others. 

For example, they did not present a counterproposal on staff promotion, opting instead to introduce a separate proposal on new or changed classifications. This proposal fails to take into account the high qualifications of many people in staff positions throughout the Libraries. It is particularly frustrating in light of how much getting recognized for their contributions matters to staff, as illustrated by the many people who shared testimonials on this topic at our last bargaining session. 

We also remain far apart on librarian promotion. We agree that the process should be more objective but disagree on what this will look like. We think the promotion review committee should fill out a weighted metric for each applicant’s contributions (which can range from publications to conference presentations to service on editorial boards), while they think we should be required to publish peer reviewed publications. This is unacceptable to us because librarians are non-tenure-eligible faculty and do not have the same funding, staffing, and time to pursue peer reviewed work that tenure-eligible faculty do. They also reintroduced language saying that the Dean’s decision on promotion is not grievable, which is also unacceptable to us since we already can’t grieve initial appointment decisions.

In their counterproposal on compensation, we were glad that they agreed with us that we should reward staff who have been at the Libraries for 25 or 30 years with longevity raises; we disagree, however, on how much those raises should be. They also proposed paltry annual raises and meager yearly changes to the salary floors for each position. The language in this proposal also indicates, for the first time during these contract negotiations, that they are looking to negotiate a five year contract; since our current contract is three years and higher education is changing rapidly, we would like to meet them at the bargaining table more frequently than every five years, especially since they rejected our AI proposal since they said things are happening too fast to provide guidelines on AI.

They did not present a counterproposal on professional development during the session, but said they would share it after the session; this is frustrating to us because they’ve had our proposal on professional development since June 4.

They also continue to reject our proposals without providing counteroffers, this time on cost of living, employee contributions to health care, and mental health co-pays.

The bargaining committee will work to draft counterproposals before our next bargaining session on Thursday 8/13 from 9am-3pm at 1800 Sherman, Room 4-430. The bargaining session after that will be on Tuesday 8/25 also from 9am-3pm. You might be hearing from us with requests to provide testimonials for issues we disagree on. Please add these dates to your calendar and consider stopping by on your lunch break or using paid time off to show your support.

As ever we encourage you to show support for our union by wearing buttons and changing Zoom backgrounds to our logo! Follow us on Facebook or Instagram to keep up with the latest updates. Reach out to us with questions or ideas through social media, email, or by contacting a bargaining committee member.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog 8/19/23

It’s been a long time coming! We have a contract! On Thursday, 91% of our union membership voted to ratify our first contract!!! We are thrilled to be here after three years of organizing. The contract has many wins that meet our bargaining priorities: Raises Across the Board Protect Our Benefits Path to Promotion Invest in Our Development Transparency, Equity, and a Voice Wins include: Raises for everyone! The first year everyone will get a 3.75% raise OR the minimum salary of their rank, whichever is higher. We will get 3% raises in Years 2 and 3 of the contract Non-librarians will be eligible for longevity raises based on their years of service: 1% at 5 years, 1.5% at 10 years, 2% at 15 years, and 2.5% at 20 years. Librarian rank and promotion! We will have three ranks for librarians: Assistant, Associate, and Senior. The ranks will have salary minimums the first year of $70k for Assistant, $80k for Associate, and $90k for Senior. Librarians will start applying for promotion in the...
Read more

Bargaining blog 4/15/2026: Time for a second contract!

On Tuesday, we had our first bargaining session for our second contract! Before we presented our first set of proposals to the University, we discussed ground rules. As we did for our first contract, we agreed to open bargaining, meaning union members who are not on the bargaining committee can attend bargaining sessions on their lunch breaks or PTO. Having members attend bargaining sessions signals to the University that members care about the issues being discussed. Members can also share testimonials on how the issues at hand affect them. This will become especially important when we get to economic proposals further down the road, so stay tuned! We also agreed that the Union can share information about bargaining sessions publicly, like on this blog and on social media! This will help us share updates about our bargaining sessions for our bargaining unit, the campus community, and the general public. After introductions, we shared our first set of non-economic proposals, or proposa...
Read more

Bargaining Blog 7.31.23

We are very happy to announce that we have come to a tentative agreement on our first contract! Since our last bargaining session, we reached an agreement on the two remaining proposals, Compensation and Librarian Promotion.  For Compensation, we agreed that: Our salary floors for each position will be increased by at least 5% for every title, with some above 20%! For the first year of the contract, everyone will either receive a 3.75% increase, or the new salary floor, whichever is greater. Everyone will receive a 3% increase for the second and third years of the contract Non-librarian staff will receive percentage-based longevity raises at 5, 10, 15 and 20 years  For Librarian Promotion, we agreed that: Entry-level librarians will start at Assistant Librarian, and can get promoted to Associate Librarian after 5 years, and Senior Librarian 5 years after that We are promoted based on job performance, research and scholarly contributions, and service to the profession and unive...
Read more