Lecturer Bargaining Update: Bargaining Recap for 12/1/2023
Our fourth bargaining session of the year—back on the Ann Arbor campus, in Palmer Commons—brought Management’s first formal responses to several proposals we’ve made since discussions started in October. But before we heard Management's counter proposals, we delivered the last of our own proposals for this year’s contract.
The morning was spent presenting LEO's proposals to build upon both the Teaching Professor and the Collegiate Lecturer programs, to establish an Assistance Fund for International Lecturers, and to address problems in the current contract around how to determine salaries for spring and summer teaching. We also proposed contract language to guarantee Management’s neutrality in issues related to union organizing, to allow for Lecturer feedback of supervisors, and to strengthen Lecturers' voices in matters related to governance and curriculum planning & course design. Our final proposal of the morning was to cut the No-Strike Clause from the current contract, acknowledging Union members’ right to strike when and if negotiations stall. As Bargaining Team Manager Nora Krinitsky explained it, “The Union has an ethical duty to disrupt the status quo that assumes this language belongs in the contract.”
We took a short break, after which Management wasted no time responding to two of the morning’s proposals: They refused to consider removing the No-Strike Clause from the contract, and they refused to continue discussion about our proposal for University neutrality related to Union organizing. This was the beginning of what ended up being a pretty disappointing set of initial responses from Management, whose “counter proposals” were mostly flat-out rejections of our initial proposals rather than attempts to reach for a middle ground on the issues. Management presented wholesale rejections of our proposal to establish a Housing Committee to address increased housing costs in the Ann Arbor region, as well as outright rejections of our proposals for childcare, for a guarantee that Lecturers can be listed as Principal Investigators on grant projects, as well as rejecting a proposal responding to a contentious issue around coursebanking on the Dearborn campus, which Management presented as having been “resolved,” even though we hear from our membership in Dearborn that the issue is, in fact, far from resolved. Management even declined to add “caste” to the contract’s nondiscrimination clause, claiming that it was already covered by existing contract language. Our current contract says nothing about caste.
There was some progress in Management's response to our proposals for communicating important information to new International Lecturers, as well as communicating information about pay advances for all new hires. And Management acknowledged a “shared interest in minimizing pay inequity” in responding to a proposal about “leapfrogging,” meant to guarantee salary minimums for long-term lecturers whose salaries may be outpaced by newer hires due to contractual changes. But our leapfrogging proposal was also rejected by the University, with the suggestion that there might be other ways to respond to the underlying problems the proposal is meant to address.
After an hour for lunch and caucusing everyone returned to the table and we answered a handful of specific questions posed earlier by Management—mostly about how our Teaching Professor proposal would work and why it's important, and about the course banking problem at Dearborn.
At 2:30, LEO and Management sent representatives into a separate room for small group discussion, and the rest of the team members on both sides were dismissed.
Please join us next week on Friday, December 8th for our next session! We’ll be back in Palmer Commons again at 9 A.M., and as always, you can show up in person or on Zoom. Remember to RSVP so we can order enough food and drinks for attendees. As the University continues to respond to our proposals next week, it will be important for us to demonstrate the strength of our Union—and to make clear that we expect much more progress in our negotiations to come.
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