The University of Illinois at Chicago faculty union reached a tentative contract agreement today with the campus administration, averting a strike that had been scheduled for next week.
The union said the three-year deal, which covers the past two years and extends through August 2015, is better than the university’s last offer from earlier this month. The union, UIC United Faculty, said it will share contact details at membership meetings beginning Tuesday, and members will have until next Friday to vote on it.
The two sides had been at odds over pay increases, minimum salaries and other issues such as the grievance and tenure processes.
“We didn’t win everything but we are happy with what we got,” said UIC English Professor Lennard Davis, a member of the union’s bargaining committee. “Things are definitely way better ... All I can say is we are happy. We think it is an improvement.”
UIC chancellor Paula Allen-Meares and provost Lon Kaufman said in a statement that the agreement “will allow us to move forward together to serve the city and the state and, most of all, our students.” A UIC spokesman said the two officials would not comment beyond the statement.
The relatively new faculty union, certified in 2012, represents 1,150 tenured and nontenured faculty members in two bargaining units. The contract is the union’s first, and comes after a two-day strike in February and threats of an indefinite strike that was to begin April 23. The tentative agreement was reached around 2 p.m. today. The union last week had asked the administration for binding arbitration, which the university denied.
The union said it would not release details of the contract until the membership meetings next week “in order to guarantee a fair and open vote.” Compensation for tenured faculty will be higher than the “last, best, final” offer from the administration earlier this month, union officials said. The union provided a counter proposal, which the administration accepted Wednesday.
The agreement will improve “many aspects of work life and professional conditions,” the union said in an email to its members.
“It is better than what we had seen before,” union president Joseph Persky, a UIC economics professor, said about the offer.
The administration’s last offer was a two-year retroactive agreement that would have expired in August. That proposal included a salary increase of 2.5 percent last year, which the two sides were in agreement on, and an offer that would “bridge the gap” with the union’s proposal for this year, according to a UIC Website. The union had requested a 4.25 percent increase this year.
However, the two sides had disagreed about the structure of a wage increase in the upcoming year. The union had been asking for a minimum increase of 3 percent for tenured faculty, while the administration had said faculty would be included in an undefined “wage increase program” equivalent to the increase that nonunionized faculty would get.
The union does not include part-time faculty or those in the departments of medicine, dentistry or pharmacy.
For the nontenured full-time faculty, the administration had not made a final offer prior to Wednesday, and the two sides had been disagreeing about minimum salaries. The union had asked that the minimum salary be increased from $30,000 to $45,000, while the university had offered a minimum salary of up to $36,000 by 2016.
Nearly 100 of the campus’ 384 nontenured faculty members make less than $40,000 a year, according to the university. A majority of lecturers are paid $50,000 to $90,000.
Union officials said that while the contract will expire in about a year and a half, they are well positioned to negotiate future agreements.
“We have one year to regroup, and we will continue on with some of the things we didn’t get this time,” Davis said. “We have shown the university what we can do when we organize.”
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