On Tuesday, 5/21, we met with the Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) administration for our fourth bargaining session. The session opened with discussion of the open letter on bargaining signed by a majority of postdocs, which members of our Organizing Committee delivered last week to Dean Harrington. In response to the letter, WCM reiterated their desire to move quickly towards finalizing a contract and offered an additional bargaining date on June 11th, and more time in our 5/21 session bargaining session.
As a result of Wednesday’s session, we are pleased to report that we made more progress in a number of areas relevant to our non-economic proposals – you can check out a summary of the progress we made through our bargaining tracker.
Two weeks ago, our bargaining committee also sent three additional non-economic proposals – Prohibition Against Discrimination and Harassment, Academic Freedom, and Intellectual Property – in order to give WCM adequate time to review these proposals. While we were disappointed that WCM did not have a response on these articles by Wednesday, we were pleased to receive counter-proposals on 11 other articles.
We started the session with WCM explaining their proposals, before taking a short caucus, after which we returned and asked clarifying questions. On Union Access and Rights, we pushed back on WCM’s efforts to reduce union rights to below what Mount Sinai postdocs have, by requiring union representatives to notify the administration of which room they will be in whenever they are on campus.
By the end of the session, we were able to make progress on many of WCM’s counters, including six more tentative agreements on Employment Records, Job Posting, Performance Reviews, Policies and Procedures, Training, and Union Security. WCM also suggested a new system for travel expenses, which would allow WCM to pay for all work and visa-related travel costs in advance instead of postdocs paying and then seeking reimbursement. We asked WCM to provide written language describing this new system before the next session. We will continue fighting to ease the financial burden experienced by postdocs for doing work related expenses.
We hope to continue the conversation on the remaining non-economic proposals both sides are working on between sessions and to continue making progress in our next bargaining session, before tackling the economic articles. RSVP for an upcoming session here.
Provisional tentative agreements from 5/21 bargaining session:
Employment Records: details the records kept by WCM about Postdoctoral Employees employment and the mechanisms and timelines by which those records can be obtained by a Postdoctoral Employee
Job Posting: describes what must be advertised by WCM for new Postdoctoral Employee positions for fair employment opportunities
Performance Reviews: creates a system for formal performance reviews by a PI, and an ability of a Postdoctoral Employee to dispute claims made by a PI in a review
Policies and Procedures: states that the policies of the Academic Staff Handbook apply to Postdoctoral Employees, and that the terms in our contract will supersede policies in the handbook if there are conflicts.
Training: requires WCM to pay for Postdoctoral Employees to attend work-related training, orientations, workshops, scientific meetings, and courses
Union Security: Ensures that the Union has sufficient resources to engage in effective representation, including financial aspects of union membership, dues payments and fees
In solidarity,
Dagan Marx, Biochemistry
WCMPU-UAW Bargaining Committee