On Thursday, April 10th, we met with Einstein for our latest bargaining session. We remain committed to maintaining and, in areas of particular importance to Einstein postdocs, improving the standards set by unionized postdocs at our peer research institutions in the city, such as those at Mount Sinai.
In an effort to reach a Tentative Agreement on Job Posting, our bargaining team presented a counterproposal in which we made significant movement toward Einstein’s position in multiple areas in order to address their concerns. However, Einstein’s response to our proposal moved in the opposite direction by seeking to exclude certain Postdoctoral Fellow appointment opportunities from the Article and eliminate the requirement that job postings contain important information for applicants, like required application materials and procedures. Our position remains firm that this Article must cover all Postdoctoral Fellow appointment opportunities to promote transparency and fairness in the hiring process.
We also made progress toward reaching an agreement on Research Integrity with our counterproposal. The most significant remaining disagreement is that Einstein insists on denying Postdoctoral Fellows access to the Grievance and Arbitration process to enforce our rights under Einstein’s own Research Misconduct Policy. During the bargaining session, Einstein presented a counterproposal on Research Integrity that introduced new language that would automatically consider any finding of research misconduct by Einstein to be just cause for taking disciplinary action against a Postdoctoral Fellow, regardless of the specific circumstances of the case. This blanket approach would not allow us to contest the investigation’s findings, nor contest whether the findings warrant taking disciplinary action against a Postdoctoral Fellow, which would be a major obstacle to ensuring a transparent and fair process to address alleged research misconduct.
In our Grievance and Arbitration counterproposal, we moved closer to reaching an agreement on a fair and timely process, allowing us to enforce our contractual rights by appealing to a neutral third-party arbitrator when Einstein violates our contract. However, Einstein still resists making the entirety of our contract enforceable through this process, instead attempting to retain the right to deny us the protections and benefits they agree to provide Postdoctoral Fellows in our contract. We addressed this power imbalance in our No Strike/No Lockout counterproposal, which clearly outlines the specific circumstances under which we reserve our legal right to strike, including when Einstein fails to honor the contractual commitments they are seeking to carve out from the grievance and arbitration procedure. Einstein has adopted a striking double standard in our negotiations — readily citing the No Strike/No Lockout provision agreed to by postdocs at Mount Sinai when it serves their interests, despite consistently rejecting the inclusion of protections and benefits in our contract that meet or improve upon those won by Mount Sinai postdocs.
After Einstein attempted to discard nearly 6 months of progress on language for our Training article with their counterproposal on March 25, 2025 (see remaining disagreements in red in our counterproposal on March 19, 2025), we reasserted our proposal on Training while addressing their concerns about the method of payment (i.e., direct payment, pay advance, or reimbursement) and whether scientific meetings were appropriately addressed in this Article instead of in Professional Development.
Both our Workspace and Materials and Professional Development counterproposals moved toward what we believe is common ground on these subjects, while requiring Einstein to provide us with the workspace and materials we need to perform our assigned duties instead of leaving it up to their discretion and opposing mandatory Individual Development Plans (IDP) for reappointment, which goes against guidance provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Notice Number NIH NOT-OD-14-113.
In addition to Job Posting and Research Integrity, Einstein presented counterproposals on Employment Records, Health and Safety, Intellectual Property, and Workload. We hope to have more substantive discussions about these articles in our next bargaining session.
You can access the full text of these proposals using our online bargaining tracker.
Our next in-person session is scheduled for Wednesday, April 23, 2025, from 1:30 PM to 5:00 PM ET. Click here to RSVP if you’d like to attend this or a future session and see the process firsthand!
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As always, we encourage you to reach out with any questions, concerns, or feedback by simply replying to this email.
In Solidarity,
Juliane Grimm
Postdoctoral Fellow, Cell Biology
ERU-UAW Bargaining Committee