Dear colleagues,
As many of you are aware, our graduate worker colleagues with the Coalition of Graduate Employees (CGE) have declared an intent to strike starting on Tuesday November 12. They have been engaged with difficult contract negotiations with the administration for over a year now and after several meditation sessions declared impasse in negotiations (following state labor laws).
No union makes this decision lightly. A strike could have a significant impact on our students, our research, and the university as a whole. We continue to hope the Administration will engage in productive negotiations with CGE during the scheduled mediation sessions (today and Monday) and reach an agreement ASAP that will meet the needs of our graduate workers.
Earlier in the term we sent out guidance regarding the potential impacts of a CGE strike on faculty. In light of the progression of CGE’s negotiations, and information about the strike being circulated by supervisors, we want to remind you all of a few things:
Faculty Work
- Faculty already have our own workloads that we must attend to. This workload has been assigned to each of us at our current FTE and pay, as defined by our own position descriptions, college or unit level workload guidelines, and our Collective Bargaining Agreement (see Article XIV).
- While it may be appropriate for your supervisors to engage in discussions about how to cover the work of striking employees, it is not acceptable to simply push you to cover work assigned to graduate employees without consideration of your own time and compensation.
- If you feel that you are being pressured to cover additional work outside of your own work assignment, please let us know right away so we can assist you.
Engaging with Grad Employees
- If a graduate worker in your unit wants to speak with you about their strike, you are welcome to speak with them.
- It is always acceptable to ask questions about their negotiations and learn from your graduate workers.
- Please do not ask them if they intend to strike or not and avoid anything that seems like pressuring them to take any particular position on their negotiations or the strike itself.
Above all, we encourage you to respect CGE’s active negotiation process and the lawful actions these workers are engaged in. And please reach out with any questions or concerns, either directly with an officer or staff member, or via our email account: info@uaosu.org.
In solidarity,
Your UAOSU Executive Council