RSVP for our Town Hall on next steps from our strike vote, tomorrow at 12pm!
After last week’s announcement that we voted by an overwhelming 91% to authorize a strike, yesterday we started to see a response to this increase in pressure. However, Sinai’s response was still far from sufficient.
For the first time, Sinai’s team provided a date for when they will have a comprehensive counter on economics: September 29, almost a full year after the start of bargaining and three months since we introduced our economic proposals.
We spent most of our 25th bargaining session reiterating the importance of job security provisions to Sinai’s administrators and lawyers. Sinai’s team repeated claims that a poor “personality fit” between a postdoc and their PI or lab should be sufficient cause to terminate postdocs within the first months of their employment without notice, explanation, or a chance to change behavior.
“After the session “personality fit” still doesn’t seem like a good reason to just outright fire someone, especially without notice. That’s such a weird thing to double down on. I’d at least appreciate someone discussing it with me, instead of them firing me without a chance to improve. It’s rude, disrespectful, and horribly unprofessional on their part.”
– Noah Herrington, Pharmacological Sciences
No other postdoc union contract includes such a probationary period. We know that terminations without cause are current practice at Sinai (read Ananya’s and Hunter’s story here). Maintaining this practice undermines just cause. We will continue fighting to ensure that no postdoc is subjected to insecurity during their tenure when their performance is not at issue.
As a signal of our increased leverage and efforts to make progress, we have reached a tentative agreement on Intellectual Property, with enforceable rights to authorship and PI status on grants, as well as an agreement on Recreation. Sinai made minor progress in all of the non-economic articles on their side of the table. In particular, we continue to see little movement on the Prohibition Against Harassment and Discrimination as Sinai continues to reject enforceable immediate and supportive measures among other protections, and only a slight improvement in the timeline for Grievance and Arbitration.
It’s clear that we need to continue to increase our momentum to win further gains. Please RSVP for our Town Hall on Thursday, 8/31, at 12pm in Annenberg Room A5-205, with pizza! Join us to discuss the next steps in our campaign to win a FAIR CONTRACT. Please RSVP by the end of the day so we can order enough pizza.
- Tell Sinai to stop trying to intimidate international workers!
- Read the latest version of our contract proposals in the tracker here and join our next bargaining sessions on September 12, 9-11am and September 29, 11am-1pm
- Contact us at organizing@sinaipostdocunion.
org if you have any questions.
In solidarity,
Pooja Viswanathan, Neuroscience
SPOC-UAW Bargaining Committee