Bargaining Session #10 Recap: Protecting Faculty is Not Management Interest
On Friday, August 21 we met with management for our tenth bargaining session, and it was hefty. (Our next session will be this Friday, August 28 from 1-3 PM in Student Center East, room 603.) Approximately 24 hours before this session, management sent counterproposals on the following six non tenure-track (NTT) proposals (which you can read in our public bargaining tracker here):
- Article IX. Appointment, Reappointment, Promotion, Layoff, and Recall
- Article X. Academic Freedom
- Article XIII. Health and Safety
- Article XVIII. Grievance and Arbitration
- Article XXIV. Educational Technology and Artificial Intelligence
- Side letter on track switching (NTT to TT)
They also sent a “revised” version of Article VI. Compensation and Benefits (NTT) six weeks after they first presented it – and it still had errors. Additionally, management’s counterproposal on Article IX. Appointment, Reappointment was not based on the most updated version we’d passed. This carelessness fits a pattern of omissions and other mistakes that, whether intentional or inadvertent, slow down the process.
Our discussion this session centered on everything above except for Appointment, Reappointment. On Grievance and Arbitration, management lengthened their timeline to report only harassment, retaliation, and discrimination to 120 calendar days but still upheld their clawback: the time limit for filing a grievance of any kind should start when the grievant knew of the contract breach instead of the status quo provision of when the Union could have reasonably known. (For further discussion of what this specific clawback could mean, see Bargaining Update 4 on YouTube.) This clawback could be devastating for members who are unfamiliar with the rights our contract affords and the recourse available. This clawback is unacceptable.
Additionally, this session was the first time we saw management’s counters on Health and Safety, Academic Freedom, and EdTech, and two stances are clear: there is a deep disconnect between policies and reality, and we’re on our own.
Throughout this contract bargaining cycle, management has claimed that policies or Statutes already exist to solve a given problem, and while true in some cases, management has refused to listen to the many cases where administrators overreach, take advantage of loopholes, or simply don’t follow a given policy. We heard testimony from bargaining team members about how current policies and protections around academic freedom aren’t enough or applied evenly; how the current policy for track switching from NTT to TT is discouraged by management; and how the previous contract’s establishment of a committee on alternatives to policing resulted in recommendations, but management has not acted on them. By ignoring the fact that stronger protections and EO training are necessary, management is trying to avoid reality. By dismissing our proposed contractual language, management is trying to avoid accountability.
Our discussion also revealed the inevitable consequence of management’s propensity to comply in advance: we the faculty are on our own. We retitled Article X. as Safeguarding Academic Freedom and Academic Work and added provisions centering management’s responsibility to protect and represent faculty against outside forces targeting us because of our research, scholarly public engagement, teaching, or service. We created Article XXIV. Educational Technology and AI to concretize management’s responsibility to engage in shared governance around a fast-moving tech landscape that affects our working conditions daily.
Management refused it all. They denied provisions for the protection of academic work, including not releasing faculty’s intellectual property without written consent. They denied the entirety of our Ed Tech article, including a right to shared governance over the implementation of future educational technology.
Why? Because management says they don’t have an obligation to do anything when our members are under attack; counsel is to protect the university’s interests only, and reading between the lines, once we are targeted by outside forces, faculty are not part of those interests.
Management is happy to trample over the very faculty that make UIC in order to avoid possibly attracting negative attention. They sign on to class-action lawsuits spearheaded by other institutions, but when it comes to defending our own for the work that management employs faculty to perform – “we’re not interested in that.” Without written, contractual provisions to protect academic work and shared governance, faculty are on our own.
On a final note, in spite of a collaborative spirit at the outset, management has said it’s “not [their] job” to propose contract revisions or give us any guidance for how to come to a compromise, ostensibly trying to force us into bargaining with ourselves. In fact, they said that “98% of what is written [in our contract] is useless.” This attitude, coupled with the total refusal to bargain over ed tech and AI – factors that clearly affect our working conditions are therefore mandatory subjects of bargaining – lead us to believe that management may be leaning towards just saying “no” as a tactic more so than they have in the past. Negotiation should be a conversation; “no” is not negotiation, and refusing entire articles is not negotiation. We eagerly await an opportunity to actually negotiate with management with the shared goal of settling a fair contract.