Vote Now to Authorize Arbitration If We Need it to Win a Contract
We met with the University again this week. The University continues to resist enhancing the quality of Postdoc life at UConn. We therefore strongly encourage all Postdocs to participate in our interest arbitration authorization vote.
We spent most of our time in this week’s session listening to a University presentation about how state budget cuts affect the University’s budget. We understand the University’s overall challenges created by cuts in state appropriations. But we also know that most Postdocs are not funded by the state and that the value of the work we do as Postdocs far outweighs the costs of our salaries and benefits.
While the University clearly hopes to cite the state budget crisis as justification to oppose economic improvements for Postdocs, we believe our proposed improvements would help the University attract the best researchers, which in turn will help continue to increase the overall research budget and quality of UConn as a research institution. The University’s proposal for a one-time $6 increase to the minimum annual salary for Postdocs, with no guaranteed raises, moves us in the opposite direction. They can, and should, do better.
Despite the University’s unreasonable attitude on economic proposals, we did have some productive discussion of our proposals for reasonable workload protections and language ensuring that the University would consider any required training to be part of our regular work time and would reimburse any costs associated with such training. We hope to make more progress next week.
Please let us know if you have any questions and we would be happy to follow up.