23 Sep Contract Bargaining: Present and Future
- On Monday, the UICUF bargaining team returned all articles in our court to the management team; Management returned three, mostly just crossing out all of our proposals.
- Management is still sitting on our key economic proposals with no response for six weeks.
- All members are encouraged to attend the next bargaining session, Thursday, September 29, 12:30-2:30, Student Center West 206 and on zoom.
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Bargaining Update
Our proposals on articles dealing with compensation, appointment, and reappointment are still sitting unanswered by the management team, even though they received our compensation proposal six weeks ago, and our appointment and reappointment proposal three months ago. On Tuesday our team presented counter proposals on all articles that had been in our court. It is up to management to move the negotiation process forward.
We did receive three counter proposals from the management team. While we are finding some common ground on physical conditions, they reject clarification of shared governance rights and intellectual property rights as well as inclusion of guarantees of mental health services to students, staff, and faculty.
They insist that the administration is already doing what it can regarding mental health, and insist that the issue of student and staff well-being doesn’t belong in a faculty labor contract. Our position is that the mental health of students and staff is part of faculty working conditions: when students’ mental health needs are not met by the counseling center, the work falls upon faculty in a variety of ways. We believe that UIC students are entitled to all the services currently available to students at UIUC, which is not currently the case. In particular, we are demanding that, like at UIUC, UIC students have access to free learning disability assessment upon demand.
The administration is questioning the need to increase enforcement mechanisms guaranteeing equitable access to shared governance across colleges and units and denying increased support via the contract for member mentorship for career advancement (we were told that is another issue management is currently working on). They prefer to invest in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity and pay $4,650 dollars per faculty member for a faculty success program instead of investing up to $500 to reimburse their own faculty who are willing to serve as mentors to junior and associate faculty.
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Next Week and Beyond: Attend and Testify
The next bargaining session will be Thursday, September 29, from 12:30-2:30, at Student Center West 206, viewable on zoom. We encourage all members to come to this session to see for yourself how this process is playing out, and to show support for our bargaining committee. All members are welcome to participate in caucus discussion during and after the session. If you cannot attend next week, please check our union calendar for future dates, and commit to coming to at least one session in the next month.
We are also looking for people interested in testifying during bargaining about issues of concern to you. In particular for upcoming sessions, we are looking for people to speak about the failures or inconsistencies of shared governance in their units or colleges, lack of mental health services, or mentoring (as a mentor or mentee). If you would like to explore this possibility, please reach out to us at uicunitedfaculty@gmail.com. Any member can send testimonies to the bargaining committee to be shared at the bargaining table. Members who volunteer their testimony can always remain anonymous upon request.
In Solidarity,
The UIC UF Bargaining team
Xochitl Bada (Associate Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies) | Aaron Krall (Senior Lecturer, English) | Andy Baker (Clinical Assistant Professor, Music) | Anna Kornbluh (Professor, English) | Becky Bonarek (Lecturer, Tutorium in Intensive English) | Charitianne Williams (Senior Lecturer, English) | Gosia Fidelis (Associate Professor, History) | Ian Collins (Clinical Assistant Professor, Daley Library) | Jim Drown (Senior Lecturer, English) | Jeff Gore (Senior Lecturer, English) | Jennifer Rupert (Senior Lecturer, English, Gender and Women’s Studies) | Kate Floros (Clinical Associate Professor, Political Science) | Kate Lowe (Associate Professor, Urban Planning and Policy) | Kevin O’Brien (Clinical Associate Professor, Library of the Health Sciences) | Kevin Whyte (Professor, Math, Statistics, and Computer Science) | Laurie Quinn (Clinical Professor, Biobehavioral Nursing Science) | Nicole Nguyen (Associate Professor, Educational Policy Studies) | Paul Preissner (Professor, Architecture)