Submit a testimonial about your experience at Princeton
We had our 5th bargaining session today with Princeton, and we are happy to make progress on winning our first union contract. As usual, five postdoc observers have joined us in the room following the administration’s unreasonable resistance to limiting the observer numbers.
Regardless, we are excited to announce that we are able to make progress with presenting new proposals, addressing their questions about past articles, as well as receiving a few counter-proposals from the administration. You can read their counter-proposals on Employment Records, Job Posting, Union Management Committee, and Workspace and Materials by following the links. While we will be working on responding to their suggested changes, you’re always welcome to reach out to us about any specific topics.
Following that, we have presented 6 more articles in this session:
- Vacation and Personal Days; where we demand 30 vacation days and 6 personal days, that are available starting at the first day of our employment.
- Professional Development; universalizing the already existing resources and expanding additional resources for all postdocs, including $5,000 for professional development related activities
- International Researcher Rights; where we aim to secure increased support for postdocs on visas, including reimbursement for immigration related costs, urgent legal support, good faith effort from Davis IC with accurate, timely, and up-to-date information.
- Leaves; establishing a clear policy that allows us to take leaves of absence from work when necessary
- Parking and Transit; introducing improvements to already-existing policies with various new subsidies, more frequent university shuttles throughout the year while extending bus route 3 to include stops in Plainsboro, protected bike lanes, and many more.
- Tax assistance; adding new measures making the tax filing easier for us (..we all know doing taxes is a massive headache!)
All of our proposals and Princeton’s replies can be found in our bargaining tracker.
The next session will take place on January 21st, sign up here if you’d like to be an observer.
Again, we want to encourage you to use our testimonial submission form to share any experiences or difficulties at Princeton. Your story could help strengthen our arguments for strong rights and protections in our union contract and prevent similar cases from happening in the future. If you fill out the form, a fellow postdoc will follow up with you to talk more about your story.
Umut Kamber
PUPS-UAW Bargaining Committee
Associate Research Scholar
Department of Physics