March 28, 2025
The team stayed in bargaining today for 13 hours (!!!!) from 9am to 10pm. We had a win today - three tentative agreements (TAs) on Assignment of Duties,Workload, and ID of Union Representatives! This is a huge win, as we have been in discussion about paths to agreement on these topics for weeks (or, over a year if you count that we submitted the original proposal in our first bargaining session on February 28, 2024).
Assignment of Duties key takeaways are that employee assignments are meant to support, and not inhibit, our abilities to do our work in teaching/ librarianship, scholarly/creative productivity, and service. Employee preferences will be considered and they will know what courses they are teaching in the upcoming semester by May 15th (for fall), and December 1st (for spring). If a teaching assignment needs to change after this date, the employee will be consulted and a number of factors will be used to make conscientious choices to match new courses to the employee (previously taught courses, if another section of a currently assigned course can be provided, how professional qualifications align with course content).
The biggest takeaway for Workload is protection of current teaching load practices in departments. An employee with sufficient scholarly and creative productivity, and assigned institutional and departmental service responsibilities shall not be assigned more than eighteen (18) credit hours of teaching, and less for some departments. Each department will need to develop a workload policy, including a justification for a standard load other than 3-3, but we have on the record that it is not Admin’s intent to make broad changes to increase teaching load. Workload policies will be developed at university-level, college-level, and for each department. For departments, the workload policy will establish standards and expectations for teaching/librarianship, scholarly and creative productivity, and service requirements in accordance with R2 norms, the discipline, and existing practices in the unit.The standards will be based on a maximum number of twenty-four (24) credit hours for each 1.0 full time equivalent employee .
At this stage we are having intense “off the record” economics discussions. Our team continues to push for guaranteed raises that address inflation. We already had full day bargaining sessions on our calendars for Wednesday and Friday, and yesterday the teams agreed to also meet on Tuesday and Thursday beginning at 1:00 pm.
We had a great turnout at last week’s rally, BUT we still need pressure into next week. The pressure you create by participating in the actions below increases our table team’s power.
Join a picket training!
Come to the next rally on Thursday, April 3rd!
Attend the General Member Meeting (GMM) on Wednesday, April 2nd!
We are getting close - but there is still a long stretch to the finish line. Make it strong!
