Yesterday afternoon your elected bargaining committee had its third bargaining session with the NYU administration. As always, you can follow our progress towards a strong first contract by email, on the bargaining blog on our website, and on the bargaining tracker. And you can observe bargaining directly in person or by zoom – RSVP here to join our next session!
We started by reminding the administration of its legal duty to provide us with complete, accurate, and timely responses to our request for information. Contract faculty voted overwhelmingly to ratify bargaining goals that would improve our working conditions and students’ learning conditions at NYU. To craft specific proposals that achieve these goals, the bargaining committee needs accurate information on matters like contract faculty members’ compensation, expected workload, and health and safety hazards — to name a few. Under the law, the administration is required to answer such questions.
We asked our first round of questions on July 14 — 175 days ago — but still the administration is dragging its feet on many responses, giving us responses that are incomplete or error ridden, that don’t answer the question, or in some cases giving us no response at all. Over and over for an hour yesterday, we heard the sort of excuses we’re used to hearing from struggling students: the questions were confusing, the research was too hard, they didn’t know where to look for the answers. Just as we do with our students, we helped where we could: we explained some questions and narrowed others; we gave them ideas for where to look; we reminded them of the rules. But consider this a flag in NYU Connect: Just as students must eventually do the work or not pass the class, so too must the administration provide the information we have demanded in order to bargain our contract, or we will take them to arbitration and enforce the law.
Beyond the requests for information, we gave the administration’s team a counterproposal on the Recognition article. We hope to come to an agreement on this first article soon. (As a reminder, you can follow the progress on all proposed articles, including seeing the text of each proposal and counterproposal, on the bargaining tracker.)
We asked the administration whether they had responses to the four articles we presented to them in the last session: Union Security, Union Rights and Access, Holidays and Workspace and Materials. Here, too, the administrations’ negotiators are moving slowly. They asked questions about union security — a standard provision that is in every other union contract the administration has signed — that they knew the answers to, and they presented a paragraph-long counterproposal to Union Rights and Access that left unaddressed the vast majority of what we had proposed. They told us they thought we didn’t deserve guarantees of holidays, and they insisted we would have to wait until we bargain over economic matters such as compensation and retirement to talk about the offices, classrooms, and supplies we need to do our jobs.
Colleagues from across the university joined our observer pre-meeting on zoom, discussing why we want a strong first contract!
Despite the administration’s footdragging, your Bargaining Committee came prepared to work. We presented seven new proposals:
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Job Postings – This provision would establish fair provisions in job postings and hiring, like that job applicants should know the basics of what the job entails, and that the legally mandated salary ranges in the ad should be honest.
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PI Status – This short article would make it so we no longer have to ask for permission to do our jobs as faculty mentors to student research or as grant applicants, but rather could be named principal investigator automatically.
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Personnel Files – We proposed that the administration follow basic data security and privacy principles to protect our personnel files, like that we have the right to review and correct our files and that third party companies not be permitted to exploit our personal data for profit.
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Union-Management Committees – This article would establish committees in each school and at the university level so the union and the university can convene to head off problems before they come up, and to talk about how the contract will be implemented in each unit.
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Faculty Handbook – We expect that much of what we negotiate in the contract will require that the faculty handbook be revised; this proposal would require the administration to promulgate a handbook that is consistent with the eventual contract.
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Successorship – This article would ensure that should a school, department, or other unit of the university be sold, spun off, or merged with another institution (as has happened several times in the last century), the contract we are bargaining would still apply.
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Severability – This standard contract provision says that if the law changes or a court decides that part of the contract is unenforceable, the rest of the contract will stay in force.
While we are disappointed at the administration’s sluggishness, as professors we’re used to dealing with delayed assignments and missed deadlines at the end of the semester. We won’t let it deter us, and with your help we will continue to show the administration we’re serious about bargaining the strong first contract we need and deserve. You can join us on Thursday, December 19 from 10am to 1pm, when we will again propose new non-economic articles and respond to any counterproposals the administration offers us. RSVP here to observe the last session of the semester.
The more people who come to bargaining in person or by zoom, the stronger our message to the administration: we are here to bargain seriously and make progress toward writing a strong first contract. Show the administration’s team that they’re bargaining not only with your eleven elected representatives but with the whole contract faculty of NYU. RSVP to the next bargaining sessionand click here to tell us you want to get involved in fighting for one or more of our 13 bargaining goals. It takes all of us.
In solidarity,
Contract Faculty United – UAW Bargaining Committee
Heidi White (Liberal Studies)
Fanny Shum (Mathematics, Courant Institute)
Jamie Root (French Literature, Thought and Culture, Arts & Science)
Chris Chan Roberson (Undergraduate Film & TV, Tisch)
Jacob Remes (Gallatin School of Individualized Study)
Benedetta Piantella (Technology, Culture, and Society, Tandon)
Peter Li (General Engineering, Tandon)
Elisabeth Fay (Expository Writing Program, Arts & Science)
Thomas Hill (Center for Global Affairs, SPS)
Robin Harvey (Teaching and Learning, Steinhardt)
Richard Dorritie (Rory Meyers College of Nursing)