4/29/22 LEO-GLAM Bargaining Recap
Our April 29th session demonstrated admin’s reverence for the status quo. They seem to like the way everything is currently done—including underpaying LACs across the board—and are resistant to changes that relate to salary, promotion, and professional development. However, we didn’t form a union to accept the status quo. We’re here to advocate for meaningful changes that will impact our working conditions. We presented counters on Salary and Professional Development articles, and we proudly delivered our petition signed by an overwhelming majority of members in support of our bargaining platform.
We did make meaningful movement in our Salary proposal by changing the equity calculation from Years of Service at the university (in any position) to Years of Service as a LAC, which decreases the overall cost of our proposal. However, administration expressed dissatisfaction with this movement, characterizing it as insufficient given how long we have been bargaining. Why has it taken this long to have conversations about salary at the table? Perhaps because the administration sat on our initial salary proposal for nearly 2 months. While we share administration’s desire for things to move faster, we won’t be rushed when it comes to critical issues for our members, and we will continue to fight for equitable salaries. Bargaining Team member Dave Choberka spent time at the table presenting graphs that illustrate the current problems with distribution of our salaries, and showing how our proposal would address them.
We are pleased to say that administration has finally agreed to remove all references to “non-promotion eligible Employees” and end their attempt to codify a tiered structure for LACs.
We also spent a lot of time discussing one of our favorite terms, “academic judgment.” While we’ve had several conversations about this phrase that appears in many proposals regarding management’s authority, we have finally resolved that in cases of promotion, this “academic judgment” must directly relate to and follow the set criteria established for the process, and is not a blank check.
Highlights of the bargaining session:
We presented our petition in support of our bargaining platform, signed by an overwhelming majority of LEO-GLAM members.
LEO-GLAM shared counters on Salary and Professional Development.
Counters on Packages 4, 6, and 7 were passed back and forth. (Check out the Proposal Tracker for that break down)
We look forward to seeing you at Bargaining again next Friday!