Our Eighteenth bargaining session on October 18 began with a brief side conference on inaccuracies in the administration’s list of bargaining unit members released to us on September 20.
We then proceeded to begin our bargaining session with a detailed discussion of the grievance article. Questions that were discussed centered on whom to file an initial grievance with — many of us have multiple supervisors and it is not always clear who would be the proper person to with whom to take this step. We want to make sure that our members are not disadvantaged by filing with the “wrong” person inadvertently, or because their complaint is judged to be not “in good faith” by the administration. We also had concerns over the term “academic judgement” which admin. used in its grievance proposal.
We then received the admin’s second counter proposal to our proposals on discipline and discharge as well as to the no-strike/no lockout provision. These are very straightforward and standard clauses in most contracts and our proposals on these items are relatively brief. Administration wants the union to take on a large disciplinary role towards its own members, something we reject.
After an admin. caucus of eighty minutes we reconvened and our chief negotiators TAd a brief clause on “electronic availability of agreement”.
We then continued the discussion about grievance and clarified additional points . After a second caucus of about twenty minutes, the admin. team was unable to present us with a cogent proposal that reflected our understanding of the discussion.
Altogether we spent about an hour at the table, and one hour and twenty minutes in caucus. About twenty-five minutes were spent in side-bar conference.
Our next bargaining Session is on October 22 at 8 am.
