We come with updates from an eventful bargaining session last Friday. We presented four new articles and one counter proposal. In addition, management returned with a counter-proposal on Grievance & Arbitration.
New articles we proposed:
- Academic Freedom: This protects your rights to pursue research and teach curricula without restrictions.
- Protections from Discrimination, Harassment, and Abuse: This document defines types of prohibited conduct, requires management to be preventative, and sets forth paths to seek remedies when these occur.
- Job Postings: This creates transparency and opportunity, ensuring that when new positions are created they must be posted.
- Access to Services: This codifies and standardizes rights that many in our unit already have, but others do not. For example: right to a desk, a University-provided computer, and year-round email access.
Counter-proposals we offered in response to management:
- Labor Management Committee: We counter-proposed, and ultimately got a verbal Tentative Agreement on this article, which establishes how the Union and Management will schedule regular meetings to address emergent issues during the contract term (such as COVID).
Management’s Counter-proposals:
- Grievance and Arbitration: Management counter-proposed on this article that establishes how we address violations of the contract.
Highlights:
Management had a lot of questions on the logistics of our Job Postings article. These mostly can be addressed in their counter-proposal. They were particularly concerned with the perceived logistical difficulty of our request that employees who have “timed out” under current term limit policies receive the preferential treatment of a current unit member for purposes of future job postings.
Our proposed article on Protections from Discrimination, Harassment, and Abuse specifies a number of different kinds of discrimination we want to prohibit. A key sticking point for management in discrimination protections was asking why we included certain groups as protected, going far beyond the current protected classes in law and University policy, They questioned whether our members do indeed face discrimination due to some of the additional characteristics we listed, including weight, height, neurodivergent status, and public assistance status. As the administration’s lead negotiator explained, “I can’t think about someone being in a socio-economic status that they are afraid to be discriminated against.” If you have experienced discrimination of any form related to any of the protected characteristics we seek to protect forms and are willing to share stories at our next bargaining session, please reach out to hawuawbc@gmail.com. A full list of protected characteristics from our proposal is below.
You can see all of the proposals that we and the administration have passed in previous sessions on our new Bargaining webpage. And, as always, if you would like to receive Zoom links to listen in on future bargaining sessions, RSVP here.
In solidarity,
HAW-UAW Bargaining Committee
Protected Characteristics include any or all of the following: age, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship status (subject to compliance with federal and state law), sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, religion, creed, ancestry, disability, neurodivergent status, height, weight, marital or domestic partnership status, genetic information, medical condition, caste, or other form of inherited social hierarchy, current or previous socio-economic status, public assistance status, membership or activity in a local commission created for the purpose of dealing with discrimination, membership in any labor union, political persuasion or affiliation, length of previous employment or service to the Employer, HIV or another chronic illness status, pregnancy, familial status, housing status, military service, special disabled veteran or veteran status, criminal record, history of incarceration, or membership in other protected classes as set forth in state or federal law.