A Union Grievance Procedure
The purpose of a Union Grievance Procedure is to increase the leverage of graduate workers to set clear standards for things like workload and authorship and to ensure that they are applied fairly across departments and labs. The grievance procedure enforces those standards when they are not followed by the University Administration.
A Union Grievance Procedure is different from an academic grievance procedure in a number of key ways:
Union grievances concern issues relevant to our relationship to IU as graduate workers, not just questions of academic progress.
You are not alone. In academic grievance procedures, it’s often an individual facing the University Administration. In a union grievance system, the union as a whole — as a group of graduate workers — or department-level union representatives file grievances on behalf of graduate workers. This protects graduate workers’ academic relationship with their advisor while asking for fairness in treatment.
We will negotiate for a grievance procedure that ends in third-party binding arbitration to settle disputes that cannot be settled at the department or at the college level. The union will insist on an outside neutral arbitrator (not paid by IU). This changes the power dynamics in the department. Because disputes could be settled by an outside arbitrator, graduate workers will have more power inside the department to bring up problems and get them resolved without even filing a grievance.
What kind of issues could graduate workers bring up through a grievance procedure?
Clear Guidelines for Authorship: Require each department to meet with a graduate worker committee from each department to create standards for authorship enforceable by the union grievance procedure.
Opportunities for All: The benefits and the burdens of running a lab should be distributed equally or fairly among graduate workers.
Prevent Unrealistic Workloads: Graduate workers need a mechanism for contesting situations when time on the job, especially for work not directly related to academic progress, is more than the workload standards of the employment contract.
Establish Rules for Intellectual Property: Similar to the question of authorship, the union will propose a process for establishing guidelines for crediting graduate workers for intellectual property.
Graduate workers need a voice to address their work-place concerns.