Submit a testimonial about your experience at Princeton
We had our 2nd bargaining session today with Princeton, and we are happy to make progress on winning our first union contract. Similar to last week, we had our session with five postdoc observers in addition to our bargaining team due to the administration’s unreasonable resistance to limiting the observer numbers. While we still hope to make progress on the ground rules and several other limitations that the Princeton administration wants to enforce, we were excited to move on with presenting more articles related to postdoc working conditions.
Following the 8 articles that we introduced last week, we also presented 12 more articles in this session:
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Waiver; detailing the legal requirements both parties shall follow for the life of the agreement
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Recognition; stating which titles/positions are included as a part of the bargaining unit
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Appointments, Reappointments and Appointment Security; discussing the appointment procedure, demanding a minimum appointment length of 3 years, and ensuring the reappointments are done in a timely manner.
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Intellectual Property; allowing postdocs to apply for grants as Principal Investigators or co-Principal Investigators, and codifying the rights of intellectual property
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Workload; setting clear expectations for full-time work while allowing flexibility for personal or professional circumstances
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Health & Safety; securing a safe, healthy, and comfortable work environment, and giving our union to attend the University’s Health and Safety Committees
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Prohibition Against Discrimination and Harassment; ensuring our work environment is free from discrimination, mistreatment, abuse, or coercion, without fear of retaliation; and codifying prohibited conduct
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Freedom of Speech and Expression; assuring Princeton’s commitments to freedom of speech and expression,
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Discipline & Dismissal; outlining the procedure for any disciplinary action based on work performance or conduct
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Grievance & Arbitration; establishing grievance procedures in case of a violation of our contract, detailing the process for addressing grievances and formal steps
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Union Access and Right; ensuring our union is capable of representing us in the most transparent and straightforward fashion
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Union Security; securing our union’s operation to its fullest extent, and resources for the long-term effective representation
We are also glad to announce that we have reached our first tentative agreement on one of the articles, Severability. This is an important milestone in our movement.
The next session will take place on January 14th after the winter break. So far, we have passed 20 articles to Princeton and reached a tentative agreement on one of them, and we are still waiting to hear back about the other 19. In the next session, we hope to continue the discussion of ground rules and hear more responses from Princeton on our remaining proposals. All of our proposals and Princeton’s replies can be found in our bargaining tracker.
Meanwhile, we want to encourage postdocs and scholars to use our testimonial submission form to share any experiences or difficulties at Princeton related to these issues. Specific examples of how these issues affect postdocs will strengthen our arguments for strong rights and protections in our union contract and prevent similar cases from happening in the future. You can use our testimonial submission form, and a bargaining committee member will follow up with you.
Umut Kamber
PUPS-UAW Bargaining Committee
Associate Research Scholar
Department of Physics