Categories: Updates

Today’s bargaining session: admin made little movement

Today, grad workers met with Penn admin for our third bargaining session. We are disappointed that admin failed to provide responses to 16 of the proposals we have given them so far. The University’s bargaining team addressed only two of our non-economic proposals today: Employment Records and Job Posting. While Penn’s team provided a genuine counter-proposal on our Employment records article, they simply responded “no” to our Job Posting proposal without providing a substantive response, no matter how hard we pressed them.

In today’s session:

We proposed 3 articles: Discipline and Dismissal; Appointments; and Job Expectations and Scheduling of Work.
We presented counter proposals for both Job Postings and Employment Records.
Penn admin proposed 2 articles: No Strike/No Lockout and Entire Agreement.

We hope that management will come to our next session with more counter-proposals so that we can start making progress on the articles that are most important to us.

Today’s session reaffirmed what we already know: Penn admin will not move unless we build power and push them to do so. No amount of maneuvering in the bargaining room can replace the one real tool we have: organizing to take collective action in our workplace. We were thrilled to have dozens of grad student workers together applying pressure to management, and we look forward to seeing more of our coworkers at the next session on Thursday, November 21st. RSVP here.

If you are interested in strategizing around building the power we need to win the contract we deserve, join your co-workers on Zoom for the contract action working group meeting, on Fridays the week of bargaining at 2pm (Nov. 8, Nov. 22, Dec. 6, Dec. 13). If you’re on the slack, join the #contract-action-team channel to continue the conversation.
If you’d like to help strategize on what should be in our healthcare article, RSVP for the Health Insurance Town Hall – on Tuesday, November 19 at 5:30-6:45 pm at David Rittenhouse Laboratory in room A5.

In Solidarity,

The GETUP-UAW Bargaining Committee

Clara Abbott

Emily Aunins

Peter Bailer

Oishi Bardhan

Kal Brown

Eli Fastow

Adina Goldstein

Sam Herrmann

Austin King

Sam Layding