On Tuesday, May 20, 2025, we met again with the administration for our 19th bargaining session:
During this session, Dr. Federica Zanotti, a postdoc in Cell Biology, shared her recent experiences and the difficulties she faced when she had to renew her visa recently during the Trump administration. To address the mental and financial burden international postdocs face, which negatively impacts our ability to focus on research, we reasserted our demands for longer visa durations and financial support for visa-related expenses in our counterproposal on International Postdoctoral Fellow Rights. We had a productive discussion, at the end of which the Einstein administration seemed more open to offering longer visa durations. We hope to see more progress on this critical article in our next bargaining session.
We also discussed our proposals on Research Integrity and Intellectual Property. We pushed back on Einstein’s continued efforts to seek carve-outs from the enforcement of these provisions through a neutral third party and tried to weaken our authorship rights by denying us the right to approve the final version of a manuscript before publication.
In this session, we also received Einstein’s counterproposal on the Training article.
We will keep fighting to overcome Einstein’s opposition to including basic rights and protections in our contract. Einstein’s response on the visa durations in a session where postdocs spoke out on this topic demonstrates our power when we come together and show the importance of our demands.
Our next in-person session is scheduled for Thursday, June 05, 2025, from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM ET. Click here to RSVP if you’d like to attend this or a future session and see the process firsthand!
You can access the full text of these proposals using our online bargaining tracker.
As always, we encourage you to reach out with any questions, concerns, or feedback by simply replying to this email.
In Solidarity,
Paulina Alatriste
ERU-UAW Bargaining Committee
Einstein Counterproposals:
Training
ERU-UAW Counterproposals:
International Postdoctoral Fellow Rights