At our bargaining session today, we were finally able to sit down at the table with the Princeton administration after their team’s refusal to even enter the room in the two previous bargaining sessions.
In addition to the bargaining team, five postdoc observers were present. This number was limited by the administration’s unreasonable resistance to the presence of observers. Parallel to the bargaining session, we had a demonstration of postdocs outside the room expressing our commitment to open bargaining.
In the session, we presented our Initial Bargaining Goals with signatures from a majority of postdocs and scholars. We also engaged with them in discussing ground rules for negotiations, despite the fact that this is not a subject we are legally required to discuss. We asked questions directly about the administration’s latest proposal and explained our most recent counterproposal, particularly around numbers of observers. While we did not reach an agreement on the number of observers, we are very excited to say that we were finally able to introduce 8 proposals on non-economic issues that are important to postdoc working conditions such as holidays, training, travel, and workspace and materials. You can follow the status of each proposal in our bargaining tracker.
We will debrief this session in more detail and discuss the next steps in the upcoming OC meeting this Thursday in PNI 159.
The next bargaining session is scheduled for December 10th, when we plan to introduce the rest of our non-economic articles and continue the discussion of ground rules.
Best,
Katerina Kanevche
PUPS-UAW Bargaining Committee
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Department of Chemistry