August 4, 2023
Wednesday, August 2nd, was another busy day of bargaining with WSU admin.
TL;Dr
- Our ASE team presented counterproposals on Immigration, Job Postings, Scope and Interpretation & Employee Rights (renamed Electronic ID Access and End of Employment)
- WSU returned counterproposals on Management Rights, Union Rights, Layoffs & Leaves
Please read on for more details. As a reminder, you can review the full proposals that were presented in the Bargaining Center.
On Wednesday, our ASE team returned a counterproposal to Admin on Immigration, which reasserted the importance of addressing the severe impacts of the visa and immigration system on ASEs. Unfortunately, Admin continues to refuse their responsibilities to ASEs in this area, stating that the university’s primary goal is to recruit students and not employees and therefore the immigration or visa-related issues ASEs face and affect their employment are not their concern. Our ASE team will continue to push back on this and bargain for necessary immigration support for our unit.
Our ASE team exchanged two counterproposals on Job Postings, moving us closer to a tentative agreement. Our proposal intends to create an equitable, transparent, and clear line of communication regarding what work is available for ASEs.
Our team presented a counterproposal to admin’s Employee Rights, which we renamed Electronic ID Access and End of Employment to reflect the items left on the article after our review. We removed parts of their proposal that imposed many unnecessary obligations to our unit, but we worked with admin to memorialize the sections we considered reasonable. Notably, admin pushed back on our removal of language requiring ASEs who want to speak to their union representative to request permission from their supervisor, agreeing to the statement that “[their] intention is more to avoid interruption at work rather than [remove] barriers of ASEs to get access to union reps”. We will continue to push back on this, as there are a myriad of ways in which it is not always reasonable to ask your boss for permission to seek advice or speak with your union representative.
In our team’s Scope and Interpretation counterproposal, ASEs drew hard lines around the parameters of the contract, insisting that any time that ASEs are not actively working their employment hours are not up to the University’s discretion. Our counterproposal pushed against the idea that management can tell us where we can or cannot be employed outside of assistantship hours. Further, our counter made room for interim negotiations between contracts should issues arise, as well as preservation of current employment best practices that we have not already contractualized.
Management returned their first counterproposals on Layoffs and Leaves. Their Layoffs counterproposal excludes hourly positions from the protections in this article and softens the language around guaranteeing funding. Although we were happy to see them move toward us by proposing some short-term sick leave in their Leaves counterproposal, we have much to work on regarding other types of leave. One area of concern is longer-term family and medical leaves, which management removed from our proposal entirely. Admin also returned a counter on Union Rights, which is a long article that addresses topics such as the use of university resources, orientations, and rights of ASEs to access their union representatives.
Finally, admin passed a counter on Management Rights, where three sticking points remain. Admin wants to include language that ASEs may be fired for failing to meet academic requirements (outside of the just cause standard), that admin has sole discretion over how ASEs are evaluated and over reductions in the workforce. We’ll continue to review and work these counters in the coming week.
Bargaining Continues
As always, our coalition of academic student employees will continue to work together to bargain for better employment standards for all TAs, RAs, tutors, graders, and other ASEs. There is one bargaining date left for the remainder of summer:
August 15 (10-5)
There will also be an update soon with bargaining dates for the Fall semester, so keep an eye out for those.
All ASEs are welcome to participate in bargaining by RSVPing here. You are welcome to come for any amount of time and participate however you feel comfortable; stopping by just to listen in is great too! You can also join workgroups or the weekly bargaining committee meeting by RSVPing here. If you would be interested in providing testimony to support the proposals being presented, you can submit your experience here.
Don’t see a way you’d like to get involved in bargaining & organizing? Have other questions? Email contact@wsucase.org, and someone will be in touch soon!
In Solidarity,
WSU-CASE Bargaining Committee:
Acacia Patterson, Physics & Astronomy (Pullman)
Adam Bozman, Carson College of Business – Finance (Pullman)
Andre Diehl, Comparative Ethnic Studies (Pullman)
Arianna Gonzales, Psychology (Pullman)
Aurora Brinkman, Psychology (Pullman)
Chelsea Mitchell, School of the Environment (Puyallup Research and Extension Center)
Chia-Hui Chen, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (Spokane)
Claudia Skinner, School of Languages, Cultures, and Race (Pullman)
Cody Lauritsen, College of Veterinary Medicine (Pullman)
Coty Jasper, Integrative Physiology & Neuroscience (Vancouver)
Dano Holt, School of the Environment (Pullman)
Evan Domsic, Crop and Soil Science (Mount Vernon NWREC)
Gavin Doyle, English (Pullman)
Hannah Cohen, Veterinary Clinical Sciences (Pullman)
Kartik Sreedhar, Physics & Astronomy (Pullman)
Kayla Spawton, Plant Pathology (Mount Vernon NWREC)
Kelsey King, School of Biological Sciences (Vancouver)
Miles Hopkins, School of the Environment (Pullman)
Miranda Zuniga-Kennedy, Clinical Psychology (Pullman)
Naseeha Cardwell, Chemical Engineering & Bioengineering (Pullman/Tri-Cities)
Natalie Yaw, Chemistry (Pullman)
Ninh Khuu, Plant Pathology (Prosser)
Peter Obi, Pharmaceutical Sciences (Spokane)
Raymond Bennett, Psychology (Pullman)
Rebecca Evans, Biology (Vancouver)
Shawn Domgaard, Communication (Pullman)
Tazin Rahman, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (Pullman)
Tholen Justin Blasko, Animal Sciences (Pullman)
Victor Moore, History (Pullman)
Victoria Oyanna, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (Spokane)
Whitney Shervey, Sociology (Pullman)
Yiran Guo, Mechanical and Materials Engineering (Pullman)