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How Reyes Drove Workers to Strike

June 28, 2025

A Journey Through Reyes’s Fraught Track Record of Union Negotiations

By Daegan Miller

An illustration of a crowd of similar looking people on beach with a postcard overlay that says "Greetings UICUF Members! Wow, the beach was great today! I saw this girl stick an ice-cream in her brother's face, and there was a sand castle with a real knight in armour inside! Fantastic! - Provost Reyes"

The union was bargaining for transformative pay, full staffing, job security, protection from unfair and biased discipline, and better benefits, but contract negotiations were bogged down. Union members were getting restless. Management was dragging their heels, and their bargaining team seemed underprepared, lackadaisical, and unable to do much more than say no—even while Chancellor Reyes was assuring union members that his team was working as expeditiously as possible. You might think I’m talking about our current negotiations here at UMass Amherst, but in fact, this was back in 2022, when Reyes was chancellor of the University of Illinois Chicago, and the UIC United Faculty (UICUF) union was negotiating their overdue 2022–2026 contract.

To learn about their fight, how they jump-started negotiations, and what they did to ultimately win their ambitious contract (which yielded, among many other things, a 21% raise over four years), I caught up with Aaron Krall, a senior lecturer in the UIC English department and president of UICUF.

Daegan Miller (DM): I remember when Reyes was on our campus interviewing for the chancellor position here at UMass Amherst in the late winter of 2023. We started hearing that UICUF was running a “Where’s Reyes?” campaign to help your bargaining along, and our union folks were like, “We found him! He’s here in Amherst!” Tell me, what was your experience bargaining when Reyes was chancellor at UIC?

Aaron Krall (AK): We didn’t know it at the time, but the entire year that it took us to bargain our contract, Reyes was on the job market. In retrospect, it makes sense why he was so absent. He came to the table for the first couple of bargaining sessions, but then no one saw him again. In the end, though, I’m not sure how much of a difference Reyes’s absence made.

DM: That surprises me to hear, given how much we heard about the “Where’s Reyes?” campaign. We even started using that slogan when he refused to meet with the unions to discuss his decision to break a student protest with riot police in May 2024.

AK: We bargain with labor relations, which is the representative of the University of Illinois system office. It’s the system office that ultimately has the power to say yes to our demands. We had a hard time moving our proposals forward because no one from management—including Reyes, the few times he showed up—actually had the authority to make a deal with us. It felt like we were bargaining by ourselves. And you can’t bargain by yourself!

But it’s not quite that simple because even though neither Reyes nor management’s bargaining team have the unilateral power to say yes, they absolutely can—and I would argue should—be advocating on our behalf. They should hear our proposals, take them to the system office, and say, “Here’s what our campus needs, it’s what they deserve, how do we get this for them?”

Instead, they like to pretend to be powerless, and that feigned powerlessness is one of their greatest powers because it lets them stall for as long as possible and hope we get fed up with the wait and settle for a skimpy contract.

DM: OK, this sounds a lot like our situation—management’s bargaining team represents the UMass Board of Trustees. But we never actually get to meet with the board, so we’re always playing this game of telephone. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, our members are starting to feel the bite of their meager delayed cost of living increase, and we wind up with breadcrumbs.

AK: Exactly! So when we ran the “Where’s Reyes?” campaign, which got a lot of attention, it was really a way of highlighting the total power vacuum on management’s side—that they weren’t sending anyone to the table who would actually settle the contract or even engage with us productively. In fact, the system office cared so little that their chancellor was off looking for his next job! When we were asking, “Where’s Reyes?” we were really asking, “Why isn’t management sending us anybody with the authority to get this job done? Why is Reyes looking for his next career while we’re here, doing our jobs, demanding a fair contract?”

DM: So if the pressure on Reyes isn’t what got your contract settled, what did?

AK: We struck. We walked off the job for four days, and by the end of that four-day strike, we had won an awesome contract that was much bigger, much better than most of our members thought possible. We got a 21% raise over four years; the minimum salary for non-tenure-track faculty like me jumped from $50,000 to $60,000, and tenure-track faculty saw their floor rise from $65,000 to $71,000. We got a renewable technology allowance of $1,600, better job security, more mentorship, better access to disability and mental health services for faculty, staff, and students… I could go on and on. We didn’t get every last thing we had initially put on the table, but it’s the biggest win we’ve ever had.

DM: So you may know that it’s illegal in Massachusetts for public sector workers to strike, even though it happens frequently. Can you tell me about your process?

AK: Sure. Unlike you, we can legally strike in Illinois, and, as we prepare for every contract negotiation, we also include strike planning as part of our prep. Although we would prefer not to strike, we know from experience that it is hard to be taken seriously without being able to demonstrate a credible strike threat. We’ve taken strike votes three out of the last four contracts, and we’ve gone on strike twice. It’s just part of the culture around here, and, in fact, we have members who don’t show up for union actions unless it’s a strike! 

We knew we were going to have to plan our strike carefully because we had such a comprehensive and ambitious set of demands, including all the non-salary planks we were bargaining for.

We spent a lot of time thinking about when was the best time to strike, and we worked really hard to get our students on board. We took a strike vote on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which was a campus holiday, and stayed out all that following week, returning to work the next Monday.

The strike got huge, national media coverage, which really forced management and our state legislators to actually focus on bargaining. As soon as we struck, all of a sudden management, started taking our demands seriously, started negotiating in earnest. None of what we won—none of it—would have happened without a strike.

DM: Your state representatives got involved?

AK: Like you, we have some supportive state representatives, at least rhetorically. However, it’s one thing to verbally support education and labor; it’s quite another thing to actually use your political power to pressure the university’s decision-makers. Striking gave cover to our representatives to really go to bat for us.

DM: So what has the fallout from striking been?

AK: Fallout? We got our best contract ever! The strike helped draw our union together and has been really helpful in growing our membership—people want to pay dues to a union that can win, and win big. It helped solidify our identity as a powerful union, and we’re all better paid, more secure in our jobs, and better taken care of all because we came together in a powerful and unifying event.

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