Topline Summary:
On Friday, October 9th, our elected Bargaining Committee met with the JHU administration for the 16th time. While both sides did pass counters, no new tentative agreements were reached, and one word can simply sum up the JHU admin’s position towards solutions we’ve proposed that stand to improve our working conditions: “no.” The JHU admin expressed a desire to move on to economics with haste, though, they have merely left articles stripped of meaning and utility in their wake. The JHU admin rejected four of our recent counter-proposals, stating that our contract is not the place to state our values, let alone the values of the university’s values, though the two are not in conflict with one another in our opinion, nor debate how existing policies best serve us. We know from thousands of conversations over the past few years that postdocs want to see improvement in areas they rejected, such as increased administrative support for our international colleagues increased appointment security, protections from overly burdensome administrative workloads, and the ability to ensure our employment records are accurate and free from retaliation or bias.
Both we and the JHU admin voiced a desire and commitment to move negotiations forward to economic matters. But, coming to negotiations with more rejections than counters calls into question that commitment.
What can we do?
The administration have made themselves clear – if we agree to continued precariousness around our appointment security, a process for reporting harassment or abusive conduct that is only handled by the JHU admin’s Office of Institutional Equity (OIE), and a grievance procedure that takes over a month longer to reach arbitration than what has become standard for unionized postdocs across higher education, then we can keep negotiations moving forward. Doing the following will help us push back against these positions and give us the power to improve the current processes at Hopkins, more importantly, our lives:
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Sign our Open Letter: We must increase pressure on the administration and demand that our values in the Open Letter to President Ron Daniels be reflected in the language of our contract. Nearly a majority of postdocs have signed our open letter calling on the JHU admin to resolve non-economic bargaining by meeting us on our proposals, which were put together from our collective input. If you haven’t already, read and add your name to the open letter today by clicking the link to show the JHU admin that we stand together!
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Sign up to be an observer for a future bargaining session: Want to see what happens during bargaining sessions for yourself? Click the link to let us know that you can come to a bargaining session in the future. Our next session is next Wednesday, October 21st from 10:00am-1:00pm in the Miller Research Building (MRB) on the East Baltimore Campus. The more of us who attend these sessions, the more the JHU admin understands how committed we all are to winning a great contract.
Reach out to us at this email if you have any questions or thoughts about any of the above actions. For a full recounting of last Friday’s session, continue reading below.
JHU Admin’s Counter Proposals:
We began the session by opening up the floor to the JHU admin, since we used our allotted time in the previous session to ask clarifying questions and present six counter proposals. They began by having their hired legal counsel deliver prepared remarks, stating their desire to get to core issues in economic bargaining, which we assured them that we shared. They then presented the following three counter proposals:
Discipline and Discharge: While we have reached an agreement to make discipline up to discharge imposed on postdocs subject to the just-cause standard, the JHU admin struck language from their most recent counter that would inform postdocs as to what the steps of progressive discipline generally are, and trying to hold onto their ability to suspend postdocs without pay before wrongdoing has been proven through an investigation.
Inclusive Work Environment: While making some movement towards our position, the JHU admin struck our proposal that would center postdocs who make disability accommodation requests in the decision making process during the implementation of said accommodation. Their rationale for doing so is that it goes beyond the standards set by the Americans with Disabilities (ADA) Act, but again, our CBA is an opportunity to improve upon the legal minimum, especially in a place where we believe the accepted standard in theory falls short of providing best possible outcomes in practice.
New Employee Orientation: While we have made some progress towards agreed upon requirements for new employee orientations held across all Schools/Divisions at Hopkins, the JHU admin is holding that they will need a full year after we ratify our contract to implement these changes, and wants us to commit in writing to not disparage JHU in any materials we provide to said orientations, but will not commit themselves in writing to the same standard. We discussed this at the table and believed we shared an understanding that neither of us would disparage the other during these orientations, but their position on paper remains unchanged.
After finishing their rationale for the above counter proposals, they then explained that they were rejecting five (5) of our counter proposals: Health and Safety, Bargaining Unit Information, Employment Records, Workload, and Appointments and Reappointments. For Health and Safety and Bargaining Unit Information, they provided a brief rationale around the perceived utility of the information we’re requesting, and explained that they have moved as far as they are willing to. With respect to Employment Records, they claimed the creation of a system to keep this information centralized is unnecessary despite the fact that we know this is commonplace at peer institutions, and that how these records are maintained is the JHU admin’s purview.
In rejecting our Appointment and Workload proposals, the JHU admin stated that our approach to these articles, and possibly contract writ large, is fundamentally different. The JHU admin sees our contract as a place to address workplace issues only. They maintained that it is not a place of expression for University values nor is it a policy document, despite the fact that we are, in fact, negotiating over policy as it pertains to our working conditions, and that nothing in the U.S. Labor Law precludes a collective bargaining agreement (contract, CBA) from going above that standard. The JHU admin, however, does not seem to share that desire to go above the minimum expectation based on this last session, with respect to how we work, or how long we work here at Hopkins. In their words, they are, “perfectly comfortable with its competitive standing.”
The JHU admin also justified their position around only offering one-year, non-renewable appointments based on the fact that while we are employees, we are employed primarily as “learners” pursuing professional development. When presented with evidence from our team that postdocs do not only learn, but lead, mentor, write grants, bring and develop unique techniques, and play a fundamental role in producing the world class research upon which Hopkins has built its competitive standing, the JHU admin were not moved.
Our Counter Proposals:
After a caucus, our Chief Spokesperson for this session, Jaime Eugenin von Bernhardi, a postdoc in the SOM’s Neuroscience Department originally from Chile, began the second part of our session with a personal story explaining the difficulties and life events you sacrifice by coming to work here on a visa. More than two third (70%) of our union is composed of international workers, and reaching an agreement on policies that improve the processes, time and financial burdens, and ways in which our international colleagues receive information about constantly changing policies from the U.S. government is of paramount importance. After Jaime’s testimony, we then presented the JHU admin with three counter-proposals: International Employee Rights, Intellectual Property, and Public Safety.
International Employee Rights: We considered the JHU admin’s last counter proposal and made some movement in later sections of the article as we understood their point about relevance. But, we are holding our position that the JHU admin has a codified responsibility to keep our international colleagues informed of relevant information and processes, and that our postdocs’ appointments be held especially if we are denied entry into the United States through no fault of our own. It also ensures that JHU has a responsibility to notify employees if they need to share information about a postdoc with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) except when required by law, with consent of said postdoc, or due to a felony investigation, and holds that JHU admin will not enforce federal immigration laws without a specific court order or criminal warrant.
Intellectual Property: We reached agreement on language that codifies that we, as postdocs, share the same intellectual property rights as JHU Faculty and Staff, but are seeking to codify and clarify in our contract language rights as it pertains to grant authorship, and communication of authorship on publications. Further, we reasserted our position that retaliation against a postdoc who reports suspected violations of IP policy is strictly forbidden.
Public Safety: Despite the JHU admin having rejected including this article in our contract language twice before, we feel it important to reach a shared understanding and codify the protections we have within the JHU environment, the same way that other bargaining unit staff have been able to do here at Hopkins and colleagues elsewhere. Importantly, this article would codify our rights to peacefully protest, and ensure no postdoc is surveilled or monitored as a result of their status as a member of our union alone.
The session ended with both the JHU admin and us again voicing our commitment to the bargaining process and wanting to reach a contract that improves our conditions as quickly as possible while giving each proposal appropriate consideration. Our Bargaining Committee is committed to doing just that, and we encourage the JHU admin to do the same, while maintaining that wholesale rejections of our proposals do not stand to speed up the bargaining process.
Our next bargaining session is Wednesday, October 21st from 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM in Miller Research Building (MRB) Room #G05 on the East Baltimore SOM Campus. Fill out this form to let us know that you can make it and coordinate a plan with our Organizing Committee members to attend. You can also follow along with all current proposals and bargaining updates using our Bargaining Tracker linked here.
As always, please reach out to us at this email or individually to any of our Bargaining Committee members listed below if you have any questions or thoughts about our bargaining process.
In solidarity,
Andrew Chelius, Health, Behavior, and Society
Austin Ramsey, Cell Biology
Ben Seicol, Otolaryngology/ Head & Neck Surgery
Cat LaCourse, Pediatrics
Jaime Eugenin von Bernhardi, Neuroscience
Saakshi Dulani, Physics & Astronomy, Philosophy
Tianyu Cao, Pathology
PRO-UAW Bargaining Committee