🎉 ⭐ On October 23rd, over 100 graduate student workers attended our sixth bargaining session for a strong contract ⭐🎉
Key takeaways from the session:
- We introduced proposals on Compensation, Public Health, and Access Needs
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Compensation – our compensation proposal is for a $62,440 12-month stipend for PhD workers and an equivalent $41.63 hourly wage for non-PhD workers. It also includes a COLA adjustment tied to Boston median rent increase (or 7% whichever is higher), tuition remission for all graduate workers, a $1,000 pay increase for instructors of record, and a 5% raise for the promotion to “PhD candidate”. We also state in our proposal that these raises will come from BU’s central operating funds, not from individual departments or faculty grants.
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Public Health – this proposal will secure public health protections for all grad workers, ensuring that our work environment is safe for all of us, particularly for workers with disabilities, chronic illnesses, as well as those who are immunocompromised. We’d have access to free (BU-provided) masks and COVID tests, and BU would be required to ensure that the air in all of our offices, classrooms, and labs is thoroughly filtered for both airborne pathogens like COVID and the various hazardous substances in wildfire smoke. We’d be allowed to require students to wear masks during classes we teach and request to work remotely without having to provide medical documentation.
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Access Needs – this proposal is intended to make it easier for grad workers to have our access needs met. We would no longer have to submit medical documentation when requesting accommodations from BU, and would get responses to those requests within a week. It would also ensure that BU provides and pays for ASL interpreters and CART services to ensure communication access. We would also have universal access to modern text-to-speech software. It would also create a process for us to switch offices and/or classrooms if the ones we’re assigned to work in are inaccessible and/or hazardous to us in any way.
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Workers spoke up and shared moving testimonies on why we urgently need these changes made in our workplace. Testimonies greatly strengthen our negotiations, and we’ll need more workers to speak up in future bargaining sessions. You can submit a testimony (either anonymous or with your name attached).
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After introducing our proposals, the BU administration had their own proposals on a preamble and gender inclusivity, and recognition and bargaining unit definition.
- On the preamble and gender inclusivity proposal, the bargaining team is interpreting this as a second attempt to introduce ground rules which we’ve previously had concerns about. This type of proposal is not mandatory to bargain over, and we’re concerned about the language of “professionalism and civility”. In contracts, language like this has historically been used to disadvantage people with less power and discipline them for speaking up. As the bargaining team, we share the aim of the university to make our contract gender inclusive. If you’d like to help craft our response you’re welcome to join the Bargaining Team channel on our union Slack and/or attend our next bargaining session where we’ll discuss this more in a caucus before taking further action.
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Management’s language on unit definition is taken from the election petition we filed last year. As a union we’ve had a lot of conversations about who will be covered by the contract, and how we can fight for all graduate workers at BU. Because this is a continuation of a longer discussion, look for a departmental organizing meeting to be scheduled soon to discuss this. If you don’t have an upcoming department meeting, reach out to a union rep to help you arrange one.
How did we develop our proposal on compensation?
The core principle in our compensation proposal is that all graduate workers should be able to afford to live in the city where we work. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development defines “rent burdened” individuals as those “who pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing”. There is currently no grad worker who is paid enough not to be rent burdened while living in Boston University housing. Our proposal – a $62,440 12-month stipend and an equivalent $41.63 hourly wage – is based on the calculation of how much a BU grad worker would have to be paid to live in BU housing and not be rent burdened.
We developed this proposal through months of a democratic process. In May and June workers across BU completed our bargaining survey and participated in article workshops. Over the summer our wage article team conducted research on other graduate worker unions and reviewed university financial information. In August the wage article team circulated a Wage Platform Feedback Form to understand more specifically what compensation figure BUGWU members want to fight for. In September we held a General Membership meeting to discuss our platform, with our compensation figure being a critical piece of that conversation. Finally, we ratified our platform with 97.8% voting in approval.
A living wage for graduate workers is a critical part of why we’ve been coming together to form our union. Winning this proposal at the bargaining table is not going to be easy, and will take all of us standing together to make this happen.
What is next in our fight for a fair contract?
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RSVP if you are attending our next bargaining session on November 11/2 from 9:30 - 12:30 PM ET.
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Attend our next Contract Action Team meeting. We’re meeting at a new time – Mondays at 4pm over Zoom.
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Please consider submitting a testimonial about the issues you and your coworkers have to deal with. This can be a powerful weapon when the bosses pretend to not know a thing about what goes on at BU or why our current living and working conditions are unacceptable: https://tinyurl.com/BUGWUtestimony
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Stay informed on the bargaining process! Visit https://bugwu.org/contract-bargaining/ to review past bargaining updates, and follow the bargaining tracker for the progress on all of our proposals.
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