After almost a year and a half of tense negotiations, the graduate student union strongly objected to Northeastern’s final package offer for a contract this month. 

The May 5 proposal from the university did not meet the Graduate Employees of Northeastern University-United Auto Workers, or GENU-UAW’s, demands on key issues like compensation, health insurance and anti-harassment protections, terms that it has been bargaining with Northeastern over since fall 2023. The same day the proposal was made, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs David Madigan wrote in an email to faculty and graduate student workers that if the union, which represents approximately 3,000 graduate student workers, does not accept the contract by June 5, it may be changed in light of the current political and financial pressures facing the university.

“This offer will remain on the table for 30 days, expiring on June 5th, with the University reserving its right to thereafter amend the package offer in light of the new financial landscape that has changed so drastically for research universities like Northeastern,” Madigan wrote in the email, which was obtained by The Huntington News. 

In its final package offer, the university proposed to increase graduates’ stipends by 2.5% or to $43,000, whichever is higher, for students on a 12-month appointment, falling below the union’s proposed $60,000 minimum. Moreover, the university proposed a minimum wage of $18 for hourly workers alongside a 2.5% raise each year until 2028, while the union proposed a minimum of $66.57 an hour, according to a Feb. 18 bargaining update.

In an announcement following the offer, GENU-UAW wrote that its bargaining committee received an email from the university “threatening” to claim impasse if the union doesn’t accept its final package offer. By claiming impasse, Northeastern would signal that it does not believe further good-faith negotiations can occur. GENU-UAW wrote that this “would end bargaining and illegally, unilaterally implement changes without reaching any sort of agreement with graduate workers.” 

Unions that disagree whether a true impasse has been reached may file an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB. The union filed an unfair labor practice charge against Northeastern in May 2023 following alleged anti-union tactics and retaliation against union members. 

“The University expressed to the Union in negotiations on April 11th that the parties had made significant progress, but that further compromise had likely reached an end because the Union continued to press demands that had been rejected and repeatedly deleted language important to University’s compromise proposals,” Madigan wrote. “Discussions remained stalled during both April meetings and it has become clear that bargaining is no longer productive.”

After 17 months at the bargaining table, the future of negotiations remains unclear. In the May 5 statement posted to its website, GENU-UAW said if adopted as is, the university’s proposed contract would be “the worst grad worker union contract in the nation” and that it plans to picket at Northeastern’s undergraduate commencement ceremony May 11. 

The university previously criticized the union in April 2023 for scheduling a picket during the university’s tribute for the victims of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Northeastern also objected to the union’s plans to picket at commencement this time. 

“It is disheartening that the United Autoworkers Union is planning to disrupt the graduation ceremonies for thousands of students and their families instead of putting Northeastern’s proposal to their members for a vote,” Northeastern Vice President for Communications Renata Nyul wrote in an email to The News. 

Eli Hovland, a second-year student at the Northeastern University School of Law and member of the union’s bargaining committee, said that the university has given the union “every indication that they haven’t been bargaining in good faith.” 

“They’ve been making incredibly small changes to the articles that they propose. They’ve been slowing down the negotiation,” Hovland said. “They’ve been coming to meetings and then claiming that they don’t know, they don’t sufficiently remember past articles, that they can’t have substantive discussions at the table. So really, just the suggestion that they’re offering this final package … because they’re at impasse, is just not accurate.”

GENU-UAW was initially formed in 2015. After an eight-year delay due to pushback from Northeastern administration coupled with stringent union policies during the first Trump administration, the union voted to certify itself as a bargaining unit September 2023. 

Now, the union is grappling with a second Trump administration, which has cracked down on academic freedom and immigration, upping the ante in securing protections for graduate workers in its first contract. Nicole Gerzon, a cybersecurity doctoral student and a member of the union’s organizing committee, said the current political climate has complicated negotiations. 

“If this were any other administration — I cannot stress that enough — [Northeastern] would be legally barred from doing this,” Gerzon said. “[Northeastern is] actively playing into the Trump administration, which makes it even more challenging for us.”  

So far, Northeastern has proposed three contracts: one in January 2024 at the second bargaining session, another in March 2024 and the “final” package proposal May 5. In response to the final package proposal, GENU-UAW wrote that the university had not budged on most of the union’s demands.

“Looking at the [final] package itself, it’s really a reassertion in a lot of ways of their original January 2024 package,” Hovland said. “They haven’t moved on a lot of the issues that were key in the election, that they have known for years are key to why grad students at this campus formed a union, and it really doesn’t meet the needs of this campus.”

Graduate workers have been pushing for expanded health and dental insurance, which is currently offered to graduates on a 12-month contract, Hovland said. But some students are on appointments that are less than 12 months, which he said may “create a lot of uncertainty about a lot of people’s right to healthcare under the contract.” 

Gerzon also said it was “shocking to see” Northeastern’s proposal for anti-harassment, anti-discrimination and international workers’ protections.  

“[We asked,] ‘Can we have a formal process for if somebody has a grievance against their advisor, if somebody’s being harassed in the workplace, like something formal that protects people where you don’t have to go through your department head and risk a bunch of workplace stuff,’” Gerzon said. “The university has been 100% insistent that they don’t want to set anything up because, in their words, ‘Title IX exists.’” 

Title IX, a federal civil rights law signed in 1972, protects students and employees in educational settings from sex-based discrimination. All universities that receive federal funding, including Northeastern, are required to have a Title IX office to enforce the law. 

Gerzon also said that after such a long negotiation period, it’s particularly frustrating to see other universities offer better contracts to their unions in a shorter time. She specifically pointed to Worcester Polytechnic Institute, or WPI, a small private university that reached an agreement with its graduate workers’ union in August 2023.

“We are bigger than them, have more funding than them and for the last 17 months, they’re telling us that it’s impossible [to meet demands],” she said of WPI. 

Hovland said that while he understands the relationship between the union and Northeastern will never be perfect, when they first entered into negotiations, he had hoped that it would be a productive one. 

“Other universities have had bargaining processes where they really make progress, where the university receives and responds to proposals, comes up with good faith proposals of their own that they know are moving toward what is acceptable to their grad students,” Hovland said. “They actually sort of have a not-always-amicable, not-always-friendly relationship, but a productive one.”

While the union hopes to bring Northeastern back to the table for further negotiations, it is not clear how the university will proceed.

“It’s going to take a lot of people coming together to figure out what we do to show our strength, to put that pressure on the university,” Hovland said. “But it looks like that’s what it’s going to take to make this a real, meaningful bargaining process.”