As we end the Winter 2024 semester, your WAU Bargaining Team continues its busy schedule of meetings for negotiating our new contract. The Team meets internally once or twice a week, and we sit across the Administration Team once a week for 2-3 hours as we debate and negotiate our concerns.

We finally started bargaining for our new contract on Friday, March 8. The first meeting was on zoom and was mostly about introductions, ground rules, and initial conversations about the contract, including a discussion of those articles in the current Collective Bargaining Agreement that both sides agree are staying unchanged. We are meeting weekly with the Administration Team, although we might eventually increase the frequency of meetings if we need to.

WAU members delivered a letter to the Board of Governors signed by six hundred faculty and academic staff. The letter outlines some of our core issues, including the need for wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments, flexible work arrangements, and an emergency housing program for students.

As you know, 2024 will be an important year for us at Wayne as we bargain together for a new contract. Your Bargaining Team has continued its weekly meetings, pored over our survey results, and is planning multiple ways of connecting and engaging with you over the next few months.

As we near the end of 2023, we want to reach out and thank you for the commitment you’ve shown in working together toward a new contract. The many meetings we held, the retreat we organized, and the survey we sent out all showed great enthusiasm, resolve, and commitment to addressing our work-related issues at Wayne.

Amazing! We are in awe — the bargaining survey, completed on October 25, resulted in a 62% response rate from our members. This is a phenomenal return by any standards. Thank you to everyone who participated, especially to all of you who shared your concerns in the hundreds of open-ended comments. We continue to sift through the vast amount of data and all your input. This information will help us negotiate a better contract for all our members. We continue to have departmental meetings to directly hear your concerns and help formulate our strategy for the negotiations ahead.

All WAU members should be receiving the Bargaining Survey today. Please look for an email from Survey Monkey, which will contain a unique link for you to access the Survey. The survey will take approximately 20-30 minutes to complete. You can only complete the survey once, but you do not have to complete it in one sitting: you may pause and restart where you left off by clicking on your link again. You will have until noon on Monday October 23rd to complete the survey.

Heads up! As we start preparing for bargaining, we want to hear from you about what’s important for the Team to address in negotiations. Based on the last round of bargaining, as well as information collected at membership meetings, we will be asking for your feedback on topics that affect faculty and academic staff.

Time flies! Two years ago this week, we signed the current contract (the ‘Collective Bargaining Agreement’) between Wayne State University and AAUP-AFT Local 6075, now known as the Wayne Academic Union (WAU). Our contract will expire on June 30, 2024. We anticipate starting negotiations for a new contract in March of 2024.