Monday, January 7, 2019
Dear Colleague,
Happy New Year! Remember to take our UW Postdoc equity survey if you haven’t already. This is an important step in understanding how equity issues affect Postdocs and developing stronger workplace protections.
On Friday the Bargaining Committee met with the UW administration. We passed and discussed a package proposal that covers Appointments and Reappointments, Layoff, Titles and Classifications, and Time and Effort. The administration passed counter proposals on Health and Safety, and Reasonable Accommodation.
We reached a tentative agreement on five proposals: Holidays; Recognition; Personnel Files; No Strikes, No Lockouts; and Grievance Procedure.
The Grievance Procedure we negotiated is a critical component of our eventual collective bargaining agreement, and includes the option of appealing disputes with the University administration about how the contract should be interpreted or applied to a neutral third party. This differs from existing University dispute resolution procedures, in which the University administration retains sole decision making authority to interpret its own policies; and it ensures that Postdocs will always be able to be represented by Postdocs of their own choosing. A similar procedure has worked very well for Academic Student Employees at UW, who not only have been able to effectively address issues like discrimination, harassment, or unfair layoff, but also have been able to recover compensation or benefits that had been inappropriately withheld (on the order of seven million dollars in the past several years). You can view this and all other current proposals and tentative agreements here.
And as always, you are the union so please reach out via email, facebook or twitter if you have questions or would like to get more involved. See you in 2019!
In Solidarity,
Tina Angerer, Bioengineering
Pamela Baker, Biological Structure
Matt Crane, Chemistry
Marina Dütsch, Earth and Space Sciences
Max Friedfeld, Chemistry
Hannah Horowitz, Atmospheric Sciences
Ajay Jajodia, Medical Genetics
Jiae Lee, Biochemistry
Christopher Morrison, Astronomy
Kelly Patton, Physics
Hossein Sartipizadeh, Aeronautics & Astronautics
Abdul Basit Shaikh, Pharmaceutics
Thomas Smith, Medical Genetics
Michael Taylor, Bioengineering
Michelle Tigchelaar, Atmospheric Sciences
Jian Wang, Chemistry
Alex White, Psychology
Huajun Xu, Chemistry