Bargaining Blog

As part of ACT-UAW Local 7902, New School Part-Time Faculty stand in solidarity with our Academic Student Worker colleagues who are ON STRIKE starting today after the university failed to meet their strike deadline with an acceptable contract deal. The furtherance of economic justice is a core value for our union and we applaud our SENS-UAW siblings for holding the university to account in bargaining and urge… Read more: Strike Guidance for Part-Time Faculty (Mar 6)

After bargaining until nearly five in the morning, the University has dug in its heels on equalizing healthcare across Masters and PhDs. They will not move on this issue, giving the union no choice but to strike. Forcing the union to wait nearly three hours, from 2AM onward, just to bring back the same offer, the university claimed that they still need more time. The… Read more: Bargaining Update | March 6, 2023

In our last bargaining session with The New School, we finally managed to reach tentative agreement on nine non-economic articles, including:  Article VI: Meeting Space: We have increased the number of membership meetings that the union can schedule.  Article X: Management Rights: No change from the last contract. Article XI: Academic Student Worker Rights & Responsibilities: We have agreed on a system of absence plans… Read more: Bargaining Session 11 | January 26, 2024

Before our first session of the new year we received word from the University that they were ‘refreshing’ their approach to bargaining and bringing on a new lead negotiator, Pete Jones, who handled SHENS negotiations. We were optimistic about this news and came into the session expecting to receive proposals demonstrating movement on our priority issues. We came with two packages of proposals covering 15… Read more: Bargaining Session 10 | January 10, 2024

There is sadly little to report from this very frustrating session. In our November 10th session the University listed a number of articles that we hadn’t yet provided responses to. Eight of these articles are largely boilerplate with minimal changes, and are not typically discussed in bargaining a second contract. Nevertheless, we proposed to tentatively agree on them in the session, so we could avoid… Read more: Bargaining Session 9 | December 1, 2023

Our first session open to the community highlighted many of the persistent issues that have plagued the bargaining processes. As usual, we came with substantive proposals intended to move bargaining forward. The University, in what is becoming an unfortunate pattern, responded by listing every proposal we haven’t countered on, most of which are of little to no concern to our members (e.g. punctuation changes in… Read more: Bargaining Session 8 | November 10, 2023

We brought four new proposals, dealing with compensation, international student issues, job security, and expense reimbursement. We are extremely proud of these articles that, if adopted, would significantly improve living, working, and studying conditions for our members! Read about them below. Both the Union and the University have finally signed ground-rules that allow for full University remote attendance at bargaining. Starting at our next session,… Read more: Bargaining Session 7 | October 27, 2023

We brought five new proposals today, all dealing with issues related to supporting student-workers as whole people. We delivered an opening statement illustrating the links between our well-being proposals and our success as teachers, researchers, students, and community members.  Members with children delivered testimonies speaking to the lack of support at The New School for parents and other caregivers and the need for a new… Read more: Bargaining Session 6 | October 13, 2023

On Friday afternoon we met with the University for our fifth bargaining session. The union proposed three articles and two Memorandums of Understandings in relation to proposals the University has made. The University provided counter offers on Intellectual Property and Meeting Spaces. Read on for summaries of our proposals, or you can read the full proposals here. Proposals Article XXII: Health Care We proposed 100%… Read more: Bargaining Session 5 | September 22, 2023

There is a lot to share after yesterday’s eventful bargaining session. Here are some of the headlines: Zoom Compromise The University has agreed to our proposed compromise on remote bargaining attendance, so pending a written agreement we should begin live-streaming all future bargaining sessions on a rotating basis beginning. These are open to all members of the TNS community and will require sign-in with a… Read more: Bargaining Session 4 | September 11, 2023

We are glad to report that bargaining today was much more productive than it has been over the past sessions. The reason for this is straightforward- the University’s external council, Akerman LLP lawyers, were not present at bargaining.  In their absence, we were able to make significant movement towards a compromise agreement on how to safely and transparently manage remote bargaining attendance for all New… Read more: Bargaining Session 3 | August 25, 2023

On Monday, August 7th, the SENS-UAW Bargaining Committee (BC) had our second meeting with the University. We continued discussions of ground rules for bargaining, presented our first set of proposals to The New School, and reached a tentative agreement on Article XIII, on Personnel Files. The session opened with a bizarre conflict over the University’s previous offer to open bargaining to the New School Community.… Read more: Bargaining Session 2 | August 6, 2023

On Monday, July 17th, the SENS-UAW Bargaining Committee (“BC” for short) met for the first time with the University to discuss ground rules for our bargaining process. At this meeting, both parties delivered opening statements and the University presented a full raft of contract proposals.  Opening Statements The University opened the session with prepared remarks delivered by Sonya Williams, Vice President for Human Resources. Throughout… Read more: Bargaining Session 1 | July 17 2023