UConn’s Board of Trustees has approved a tentative agreement for a three-year collective bargaining contract covering the University’s approximately 2,200 graduate assistants.

Negotiating teams from UConn and the Graduate Employee Union-United Auto Workers (GEU-UAW) reached the tentative agreement on April 21 for the contract, and the union’s members overwhelmingly ratified it Monday.

The trustees’ vote Wednesday to approve the contract means it now goes to the state General Assembly. That body can vote it up or down, or permit it to take effect by not taking action during the remainder of the current legislative session that ends June 3.

It is the first contract between the parties, and is the result of negotiations that began after the University recognized the UAW in spring 2014 as the GAs’ collective bargaining representative.

“Like any negotiation between two parties, compromise was required on both sides. Though neither received all it wanted, both sides were able to secure agreement on the issues that were most vital to them,” President Susan Herbst, who recommended to trustees to approve the contract, told UConn faculty in a letter dated April 21.

Specifics of the contract, bargaining sessions, and other details can be found at gradunion.uconn.edu.

Graduate assistants are graduate students who provide teaching or research support to the University as part of their academic programs. They receive stipends and tuition waivers among other benefits as part of their work.

Almost one-third of UConn’s 6,900 graduate students are GAs.

After the University recognized the UAW as the graduate assistants’ collective bargaining representative, both sides appointed negotiating teams and commenced bargaining about matters affecting wages, hours, and employment conditions.

The agreement recognizes that academic matters involving GAs – including coursework, grading, assignments, and decisions regarding a student’s progress toward earning a degree – remain prerogatives of the University that are not governed by the contract.

“It was essential that these issues remain in the hands of faculty members, academic departments, and our schools and colleges,” Herbst told faculty in her April 21 message.

“I am pleased that this tentative agreement preserves this integral component of our mission as an educational institution and ensures that the academic relationship continues to be faculty and student, rather than employer and employee,” she wrote.

Herbst said the negotiations were guided by three overriding principles:

• Ensuring that UConn graduate assistants are treated fairly relative to their counterparts at research universities across the nation with regard to pay, healthcare, workload, and opportunity.
• Maintaining and/or building academic excellence in graduate education, with high standards for student scholarship and teaching performance.
• Enabling faculty to teach and mentor all graduate students in ways appropriate to their disciplines in order to prepare them for careers.

The contract provides for an increase of 9 percent over three years in GA stipends, similar to the increases received by state employees.

The University and the UAW/GEU also agreed to the health plan sought by the union, which will be provided at a very low cost to the GAs. Agreements were also reached on fees, workload, and other non-academic topics.