Our bargaining committee met with the Einstein administration over Zoom yesterday for our first bargaining session.
RSVP for our bargaining town hall this Thursday at 4pm in Price 351!
Yesterday, members of our elected bargaining committee and UAW representatives met with the Einstein administration for our first bargaining session. We started by introducing ourselves and speaking briefly about our backgrounds and research. Our team then presented our bargaining goals, ratified by 98.6% of Einstein postdocs with a majority voting.
Following our presentation, we discussed our goal of building on standards being set by other unionized institutions in New York City, such as Mount Sinai, with our contract. We also proposed our first article, “Recognition” which would establish that Postdoctoral Fellows, including Postdoctoral Fellows-NRSA, are included in our union. Einstein’s bargaining team stated they “can’t commit” to working off of the agreement between our unionized postdoc colleagues at Mount Sinai and the administration there, which represents the industry standard for postdocs in NYC. Additionally, the administration’s team told us they have still not settled their position on whether NRSA fellows should be included in our union, despite having first objected to these postdocs’ inclusion more than four months ago, prior to our union election.
We briefly discussed logistics for future meetings, including attendance, format, and scheduling. Einstein’s team confirmed that they will not prevent postdocs who are not on the bargaining committee from attending future sessions. Our next bargaining session will be on Zoom at the end of September, and we hope to move to in-person meetings in October. Finally, we discussed scheduling more sessions for the rest of the year and extending our meeting times to at least three hours so we can reach a fair agreement without delays.
To hear more about today’s session and our next steps, please join us for a Bargaining Town Hall at 4pm this Thursday, September 12, in Price 351. Click here to RSVP.
Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions or concerns.
In Solidarity,
Juliane Grimm, Cell Biology
Member of ERU-UAW Bargaining Committee