Friday, March 15, 2019
Dear Colleague,
It’s been 45 weeks since we voted to form our Postdoc union with a 90% yes vote. And yet we are still without a contract.
While we have made progress in negotiations on a number of important issues, we have still not reached agreement on priority issues like non-discrimination and harassment, wages, benefits, international Postdoc rights, and more.
To be clear: our proposals on these issues are critical, but not particularly complicated. With commitment from the University administration to work toward agreement, we’re confident we could reach resolution in a short time. However, at the moment the University has only agreed to meet with us for 3 days in March and 3 days in April. We have offered an additional 23 dates of availability between now and April 28th, but UW has not yet agreed to them. The administration’s lack of commitment to work toward agreement is demonstrated by this statistic: when we’ve made contract proposals, it has taken the administration, on average, 78 days to provide a counterproposal. This is unacceptable.
There are two important steps you can take to help:
1) Attend a 45-minute meeting with your colleagues to hear a brief presentation about bargaining and get involved in helping shape our plan to win a strong contract. Please RSVP here.
2) Take the Postdoc equity survey. So far, >500 Postdocs have taken the survey, but the more Postdocs that participate, the more we can advocate for better protections.
Please stay tuned for important updates and as always we appreciate hearing any questions or concerns.
In solidarity,
The UW Postdocs United / UAW 4121 Bargaining Committee
Tina Angerer, Bioengineering
Pamela Baker, Biological Structure
Matthew Crane, Chemistry
Marina Dütsch, Earth and Space Sciences
Max Friedfeld, Chemistry
Hannah Horowitz, Atmospheric Sciences
Megan Ivory, Physics
Ajay Jajodia, Medical Genetics
Andrew Jenkins, Chemistry
Michael Mack, Chemistry
Kelly Patton, Physics
Cristi Proistosescu, Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean
Abdul Basit Shaikh, Pharmaceutics
Thomas Smith, Medical Genetics
Michael Taylor, Bioengineering
Jian Wang, Chemistry
Alex White, Psychology
Huajun Xu, Chemistry