University of Iowa grad students question administration’s commitment to contracts

Despite University of Iowa assurances of better compensation over the next two years, graduate students on Tuesday asked why they should trust the administration and voiced loud opposition to a new contract proposal that - under the state's stripped collective bargaining law - eliminates every aspect but base pay.

'We have had numerous agreements before, and we've built on the work that other (Campaigns to Organize Graduate Students) have done in the past,” Landon Elkind, president of the UI graduate student union known as COGS, told Board of Regents and UI administrators on Tuesday.

'Now the regents want to steal it away through some legislators in Des Moines and try to bust us up,” he said. 'That's a kind of hurtful abandonment. It's just morally disgraceful and practically boneheaded.”

Even though lawmakers last week passed what opponents call a 'union busting bill” stripping mandatory negotiation subjects from a long-standing collective bargaining law - including supplemental pay, health insurance, and vacation - some issues were left as 'permissible” topics.

That means employers like the Board of Regents could bargain on things like work hours, paid and unpaid leave, and overtime. But the board chose not to allow those subjects for bargaining and instead presented a new initial contract to the UI graduate student union Tuesday that addresses only base pay for the new 2017-2019 contract.

The board's offer of a 1.1 percent pay raise in each of the next two years is the most allowed under the new law, which Gov. Terry Branstad signed Friday. But it's below the 4.4 percent pay raise requested by the graduate student union - which represents 2,183 unionized graduate students employed as teaching and research assistants.

During the public portion of Tuesday's meeting to exchange initial contracts for the first time since the law change, many of the about 50 graduate students in attendance asked why the board isn't willing to keep negotiating on permissible topics.

'All of those items remain unchanged, they are still permissive topics of bargaining, which you agreed to in previous proposals,” said Gene Elk, a Pennsylvania-based representative of United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America union. 'And now you're refusing to bargain about them. This is not bargaining in good faith. This is using the new found clout of some draconian law to attack the human rights of workers here at the university.”

He continued, 'You should be ashamed of yourselves. The Board of Regents should be ashamed of themselves.”

Michael Galloway, an attorney representing the board, answered the students queries about why they aren't bargaining on permissible topics by saying, 'We're not talking about them because that's our initial proposal.”

'That's the direction that we've been given,” he said. 'And that's what we're doing with all of our contracts.”

Board of Regents spokesman Josh Lehman didn't answer questions from The Gazette on Tuesday afternoon about why the board isn't negotiating on permissible topics.

Assistant Provost and UI Graduate College Dean John Keller on Tuesday vowed to continue working with graduate students on sustaining competitive compensation packages going forward - regardless of what is in the contract. In that spirit, before Tuesday's meeting, Keller along with UI Graduate and Professional Student Government President Joshua Schoenfeld sent a letter to UI graduate students vowing to continue providing full tuition scholarships in line with the current contract.

Keller in the letter also promised to raise the percentage of mandatory fees waived from 25 percent to 50 percent and extend the UIGradCare insurance provisions in the current contract for at least 18 months - through the end of 2018.

Before lawmakers passed amendments stripping the former collective bargaining law, Keller said he couldn't discuss those topics and thus be specific about what sustained support would look like.

Now he can.

'The UI wanted to make a statement regarding non-mandatory items, particularly those dealing with tuition-fees and insurance to assure current students, as well as those we are recruiting, that we are committed to offering competitive economic packages,” Keller told The Gazette.

Students pressed Keller on Tuesday about that commitment, asking how they can trust him after he failed to persuade the Board of Regents to move forward with original negotiations that - under the old comprehensive collective bargaining law - began last fall.

'The university has been complicit either through ineffectiveness or through willful malice in trying to bust this union,” Elkind said, adding later, 'We are going to keep our union … the sooner you realize it, the better off we all are going to be.”

Keller said the university will work with graduate students going forward to address employment provisions previously addressed in the contract through new UI policy. Although Keller didn't outline specifics of how the policy would be drafted and who would be at the table.

Elkind expressed concern the union would be left out.

'It sounds like you're trying to treat us not like we're equals,” he said. 'It's almost like we get the scraps off the table once the grown-ups have finished talking. And that doesn't seem like it's really open at all.”

The board's negotiations with COGS - as well as with unions representing 550 University of Northern Iowa faculty and 5,000 UI Health Care professional and scientific employees - began in November with proposals that looked much different. But when news spread of a widespread overhaul to the collective bargaining bill in the works, regents halted discussions - prompting COGS, United Faculty at UNI, and the state's largest public employee union AFSCME Iowa Council 61 to file 'prohibited practice” complaints alleging bad-faith bargaining.

Before the new law passed, COGS and SEIU Local 199, the UI Health Care union, voted to ratify the board's last offer to them. But the board didn't move forward on those ratifications, and Lehman said now the law changes require the board start negotiations over.

The restart began Monday with United Faculty at UNI. Because the new law only mandates bargaining over base pay, the board's new initial proposal to the faculty union stripped 53 pages of the long-standing 54-page contract and offered a 1.1 percent pay raise in both of the next two years.

Those negotiations are ongoing.

After a more than hourlong public back-and-forth on the new contract proposals Tuesday, COGS and regent representatives moved into arbitrated closed negotiations that continued into the evening.

l Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com