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!

May 14th was our third Community Bargaining Day with almost 200 lecturers and allies in attendance! Allies joined Lunch with LEO to hear an update on Bargaining to this point, and engaged in a “Phone Zap” to the administrators on all 3 campuses calling for a fair contract. We concluded lunch by writing down what folks would like to see coming out of the contract to hold up during the Salary presentation.

We finally, finally, finally received a counter from Admin on Teaching Professor, and presented a salary proposal with a reduction in $5 million or so from our previous proposal.

Please join the Contract Action Team for an outdoor bargaining watch party on Wednesday, May 26th from 10 am-3pm in the Ingall's Mall canopy on the Ann Arbor Campus.

Currently, LEO is negotiating a few contract proposals related to ‘Workload’ that would make workload expectation within units available to all lecs. Clear expectations will help lecturers to have more agency over the work they are assigned to do or that they take on at some point. One goal of these proposals is to help create a ‘toolkit’ of sorts, within our contract, to address overwork and position classification problems as they are recognized by lecturers. Below, you can see some of our proposal language, subject to change via negotiations, and which will not be finalized until agreed to at the table.

The day started off well, with Tentative Agreements on Job Security & Layoffs, which extend recall rights for longer-serving lecturers and guarantee an interview for open positions in the bargaining unit to qualified lecturers on full layoff.

Management gave us counters on Layoff and Job Security for which we are close to reaching agreement. We did reach agreement in three areas: We are ready to TA (sign a tentative agreement) on Academic Calendar (acknowledging the August start date to the academic year), and we signed TAs on Articles XVII on Benefits Eligibility and XVIII on Benefits Plans.

The defining moment of the day was Management’s Salary counter at 1pm, which was underwhelming and insulting.

We are expecting management’s first counter proposal on Teaching Professor this Friday.