LEO Lecturers reached a Tentative Agreement on September 13th, 2021, and subsequently ratified the contract on the 19th. This post includes the text of the email messages that members received about these exciting milestones.

LEO’s contract negotiations with U-M administration have been going on since January. In this post, we round up the status of bargaining this summer and share resources to understand the status of negotiations.

The final July Session was a short one. We presented on Professional Development, Governance, and Retiree Email Access. We will return to the table on Wednesday, August 4. It is possible some small group discussion on various issues will happen in the interim.

This past Wednesday’s bargaining was disappointing but also clarifying. We received 5 counter-proposals from Management. The next bargaining session will be Wednesday, June 30th.

We had hoped for clarity on salary after Thursday's budget vote, but we did not receive a salary counter. We are hoping for a much improved salary offer during Wednesday's bargaining session.

More than half of the proposals have Tentative Agreements (TA’s) but many of the proposals still on the table have been some of the most contentious in this 6-month process.

The high point of the day was the tentative agreement on our workload package of MOU 2 (Full-Time Opportunities) and MOU 7 (Title Bridge between I/II to III/IV).

After much deliberation by the Bargaining Committee, we presented a Salary counter that reduced our proposal by $2 million. This movement on our part was to demonstrate our dedication to bargaining in good faith. We stressed our commitment to “moral minimums” and parity across the campuses.

The big win of the day was a TA on Article XXVIII where we’ve finally got management to agree that each School or College must publish current workload standards for each Lecturer title employed by that unit no later than January 1, 2022.

The afternoon kicked off with Bob King’s presentation showing that the state constitution treats the University of Michigan as a single entity to support our arguments that central admin can and should allocate money to support the Dearborn and Flint campuses. This was followed by impassioned speeches from State Reps Yousef Rabhi (Ann Arbor) and Abdullah Hammoud (Dearborn) in support of campus equity for Dearborn and Flint and greater funding for higher education overall.

Next, Stamps School of Art & Design instructors AndyT Thompson and Patricia Beals presented their experiences with wage theft at UM as Admin continues to deny back pay to lecturers on the 12 month pay schedule for yearly wage increases.

Negotiations turned sour when Admin struck completely our MoUs on Retiree Benefits and Governance. Both of these MoUs have been sitting in Admin’s court for 4 solid months.

Things went from bad to worse when Admin passed a new package of proposals that contained MoU: Felony Disclosure, Professional Development, and Salary. Packages of proposals means that if one side wants to accept one of the proposals within the package they would need to accept all of them within the package. However, no one in attendance expressed a desire to accept any of the proposals within this new package!