Twenty-fifth Bargaining Session

***193 days since our contract expired on August 15th***

Thank you everyone for your organizing work this week! Everyone who committed to our strike, signed up for picket shifts, did office visits, and continued to show their support and solidarity have put us in a great position to be prepared for a powerful strike and win a great contract for our membership!

The Administration’s proposal given today, while making some movement in wages and healthcare, does not offer us the tuition waiver protections we need, and would fundamentally redefine the meaning of graduate labor on this campus. The Administration is attempting to limit access to education by restricting who is able to obtain tuition waivers as part of their compensation for graduate work.

The Administration continues to attempt to use the Campus Wage Program to determine graduate employee salaries. The GEO asked for an explanation of the program and documentation on how the Administration puts together its budget. The Administration would not provide any documentation for how its budget is constructed and told the GEO that, under the Campus Wage Program, the President and three Chancellors (one for each campus) have unilateral power to decide the pay rates for employees across the UI system. The Campus Wage Program lacks any transparency and constitutes an illegal failure to bargain wages, a mandatory subject of bargaining, and we filed an unfair labor practice about this over a month ago. Today, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all emails and meeting notes between the President and Chancellors related to the Campus Wage Program.