Local 5094 Rutgers Bargaining Update, August 10, 2022
HPAE local 5094 met on 8/10/22 for our ninth session of negotiations with Rutgers University. Our contract expired July 1, 2022.
It is now more important than ever to get involved and support your negotiations team. We need to you to collectively show Rutgers you stand behind our team. Click the link below to sign the petition and to show solidarity with your negotiations team.
The University continues to delay major progress at the table by not providing our requested information or submitting counter proposals to our financials and wage proposals. Abbe Kanan, Office of Labor Relations, continues to insist that the University will be providing counter proposals and is currently waiting for final approval to submit counter proposals. Rutgers anticipates presenting an initial wage proposal at the next session.
The University provided one counter proposal on the Grievance Process. While they moved off their initial position of reducing all representation rights for disciplinary meetings to only what the law provides, their current proposal tries to limit the notification of union representation to only pre-termination meetings. In addition, the University continues to attempt to eliminate our informal process to discuss with department managers the resolution of departmental issues.
We presented three proposals in our 8/10/22 session: Flexible work, Emergency Closures, and Health and Safety. The flexible work proposal addresses the new process of condensing the work week into a four day week or a nine, working day pay period. The emergency closures protect our negotiations unit employees in the event of an office closure from being forced to remote work and provides blanket protection for all negotiations unit employees when declared essential to have notice of their status and documentation to present in the event of an emergency. Health and Safety expands on our current language for safe and healthy facilities as well as pandemic protection through PPE, quarantine pay, and creation of joint committees.
We plan to present our Remote Work proposal at our session on 8/24/22. We revised this proposal a number of times and, with the new policies and procedures from the Future of Work Committee, we wanted to make sure we thought of everything. We have received a number of calls and a great deal of concerns from our negotiations unit employees for the applicability of this new policy and procedure. The University unilaterally implemented this change without input or negotiations from our union or other unions at the University. It is vitally important our membership shows support to the negotiations committee as this proposal is presented to the University.
Our next virtual session is scheduled for Wednesday, August 24 at 10am. We continue to have a strong showing from our general membership, and we encourage everyone to continue to attend. We are meeting as a caucus prior to the session at 9:30m and are inviting all members in good standing to attend. Please register for the pre-meeting at this link. You will receive the Zoom link for the negotiations session with Rutgers at the caucus.
You should not be on work time during your attendance at the session. We are asking for a commitment of 1 hour to show Rutgers we stand behind our committee in solidarity. You can use either your personal or Rutgers device to log into the sessions.
https://aft.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAscO2ppjMuG9F3ac4LAYXmmh8koJ15hcGJ
In Solidarity,
HPAE 5094 Negotiations Committee – Justin O’Hea, Ryan Novosielski, Ana Delgado, Philip Wilson, Fatima Meadows, Jennifer Hunt, Kerry Butch, Christina Rozario, Dana LaClair, Charles Jackson, Saleena Ghanny, Susan Fenker, Robin Covington, Isabel Arroyo, and Mayra Barreto