Yesterday, we met with UW Management in our third bargaining session. We presented two proposals and responded to Management’s proposals that they started bringing to the table. This was the last bargaining session of February, with two months until the end of our current contract (April 30th).
The employee-serving Disability Services Office (DSO) and the student-serving Disability Resources for Students (DRS) are under-resourced to sufficiently meet our workforce’s needs, on top of administrative confusion over which office is best suited for supporting ASEs, who are both students and employees. Additionally, ASE supervisors often fail to implement ASE accommodations without consequences, and ASEs also deserve more training and resources to make coursework and lab sections accessible. In our proposal, we suggested a number of structural changes, including interim accommodations for accessibility requests, a designated ASE contact at DSO, jointly-developed trainings on accommodations and accessibility, and annual meetings between us and the DSO to discuss and make plans for the state of ASE accessibility at UW.
As ASEs, we know that proper credit for our work (research, scholarship, etc.) is critical for our career development, and we have made clear in our new MOU for a transitional funding program that this is one of the many ways that power imbalances exacerbate the impacts of harassment and discrimination in academia. Therefore, we proposed a new section to Article 12 to ensure that ASEs’ receive proper credit for contributions to scholarship and research.
Finally, we received a handful of initial proposals and new language from Management throughout the day, including a new section on “presumed resignation” that would make it easier for UW to terminate ASEs without recourse in Article 4 (Appointment & Reappointment Notification and Job Description).
Additionally, Management proposed a number of changes to Article 8 (Grievance Procedure) in their initial proposal, including longer response timelines, additional language around selecting arbitrators, and a new step for mediation in the grievance process. In response, we passed a counter-proposal that would expand and strengthen our tools in the grievance process to effectively resolve workplace issues and based on caucus deliberations, which included active members from our union’s Contract Enforcement Working Group. To round out the day, we passed a package proposal to Management as a response to their proposals on Articles 14 (Personnel Files) and 30 (Union Security) to affirm our commitment to bargaining in good faith towards a fair contract.
Questions? Want to get more involved? Reach out to ase-bargaining@uaw4121.org.
ASE Bargaining Team
Natalie Wellen (Applied Mathematics)
Justin Applegate (Biochemistry)
Tahiyat Rahman (Physics)
Anastasia Schaadhardt (Information School)
Soohyung Hur (Geography)
Yuying Xie (Geography)
Francesca Colonnese (English)
Candice Young (Molecular & Cellular Biology)
Natasha Crepeau (Mathematics)
Nelson Niu (Mathematics)
Jayden Wood (Mechanical Engineering)
Peter Lindquist (Earth & Space Sciences)
