By Jon McGrath
In the wake of receiving our overdue cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) and back pay, and as we look ahead to the next round of bargaining, it’s easy to forget the tremendous effort it took to get the contract we have today.
It may feel like a million years ago, but we fought for this latest, much-delayed contract for two whole years! In that time, PSU has gotten stronger, more active, and well-informed, and there’s more buy-in across the UMass Amherst and UMass Boston campuses.
You don’t have to take my word for it. All one needs to do is consider the many actions we shouldered as a union over the nearly 600 days it took to get this contract.
2023-2024: The Battle Begins
We kicked off this last round of bargaining in late 2023 with a pre-bargaining survey and a series of membership meetings to inform our demands. The public phase of our bargaining campaign then launched in May of 2024, with a membership endorsement vote of our positions.
In brief, we argued that we deserve living wages with guaranteed annual salary increases (i.e. a wage scale!), protections against runaway workloads, safeguards against privatization, and specific protections against the federal threats to various vulnerable membership groups within PSU.
Almost immediately, it became clear that the UMass management’s negotiating team was uninterested in seriously engaging with any of these topics. To the contrary: their team, directed by Amherst Chancellor Javier Reyes, proposed some of the most harmful takebacks that we had seen in recent memory—most notably the elimination of core job-security protections and the conversion of COLA for all into “merit payments” for some. As a union, we kicked into gear and rolled out a series of actions designed to put pressure on UMass and win a decent contract:
- Move-in Actions (August 30). Move-in day is a golden opportunity for a union such as ours to put pressure on management’s negotiators by connecting students and parents with our effort.
- Homecoming Standouts (September 20). A month had passed since the move-in actions, and management had continued to stall—refusing to even meet with us in an open bargaining forum. On the first day of Homecoming, PSU gathered in front of the Student Union, visible to the alumni and donors that were arriving on campus.
- Childcare Stroller Parade (November 1). To bring attention to UMass’s childcare center, which has long been oversubscribed and under-supported, and our call for expanded childcare, members from many UMass Amherst unions participated in a “stroller parade” on campus featuring the next generation of union members. This action resulted in a commitment to build a new on-campus facility to expand childcare access for UMass employees!
- SBR Agreement. As a result of the numerous actions taken in the fall, we won a transparent bargaining process that included a large number of silent bargaining representatives (SBRs). Over the course of our negotiations, more than 600 SBRs attended!
2025: Flooding the Zone
Spring
With the understanding that the administration’s bargaining team needed to see our strength in numbers at rallies, we organized a number of actions in the spring:
- Whitmore Rally (February 27). PSU members made our presence felt with a rally at the Whitmore Administration Building, urging management’s negotiating team to come to the table with a fair contract.
- Destination Days (April 5). Destination Days, an annual event where admitted students and their families are invited to visit campus, was another opportunity for us to make our voices heard, and families were indeed receptive to our cause.
- May Day (May 1). UMass unions and campus organizations held a day of public solidarity to highlight worker struggles and unity on campus.
Summer
Stand Up for UMass (August 27). With many members donning their green PSU shirts, hundreds of us congregated at the Student Union to stand up for all PSU members, including those who had the most at stake amidst ongoing federal attacks.
We want a vibrant, safe, healthy campus, including economic security for all, and this desire inspired a supermajority of PSU members across the Amherst and Boston campuses to sign the Stand Up for UMass petition. Our actions garnered considerable media attention, with a report on NBC10 Boston and stories published on MassLive.com and Amherst Indy.
Our effort to ensure economic security for all is especially visible in the work we’ve done to highlight our essential yet underpaid members. PSU B launched a campaign to raise up our dining service members—the members on whose backs UMass’s #1 dining ranking is built. To bring light to the untenable situation that our PSU B dining members are facing, we held a stand-out in front of Worcester Dining Commons on the very day that a team from The Princeton Review, the organization that has ranked UMass dining #1 in the country, was inside touring our flagship dining operation.
Fall
PSU members from both campuses held a number of actions that kept the heat on management even as the outside temperature began to drop. In Downtown Amherst, PSU handed out flyers during Homecoming weekend (October 3-4) to let visiting alumni and others know about our ongoing struggle. In Boston, members rallied and marched during Convocation, hosted “unity breaks,” and held a “Nightmare on Morrissey” Halloween eve event to engage with the larger community.
Winter
Following similar votes across campus, a PSU Vote of No Confidence against Chancellor Reyes on the Amherst campus was held on December 3, prompted particularly by his threat to impose management’s takebacks unilaterally through a legalistic “impasse” process. PSU leadership sent a communication to members arguing that “no sector of UMass Amherst—students, faculty, staff, or the broader Amherst community—has been left untouched by Reyes’s tactics, and we have watched with growing concern as Reyes has steered the Commonwealth’s flagship public institution into ever more dangerous waters.” Membership agreed: the vote passed 966 to 59, representing a 94% vote of no confidence in Chancellor Reyes. The vote was covered by news outlets including The Boston Globe.
2026: Management Backs Down
We started this year with a January 13 vote on the most pivotal bargaining decision of our campaign: should Unit A members accept some “merit pay” to be taken out of our COLAs, allowing management to pick and choose who “deserved” to be partially protected from ever-rising inflation, or should we hold the line on our position that COLA is for all and escalate our campaign? This was a fork-in-the-road moment. The PSU bargaining team announced that the vote would only carry weight if 1,000 members showed up on a live Zoom to cast a vote. We easily surpassed that number, and members voted overwhelmingly in favor of holding the line. Furthermore, we approved a day-long practice picket to turn that vote into action.
With the wind at our backs but uncertainty in front of us, we held our coordinated practice pickets on the Boston and Amherst campuses in freezing temperatures—including a day-long Amherst picket—on February 4. The UMass Boston event was the largest practice picket ever recorded on their campus, and UMass Amherst saw 600 attendees staring down the Whitmore Administration Building, singing, dancing, and marching over the course of the day.
At this point, it’s worth remembering how “inevitable” management made their merit pay proposal sound. After two years of “you can take merit the easy way, or the hard way,” Vice Chancellor Sheri Neshiem announced that the University was withdrawing their demand of merit pay for Unit A the evening before our practice pickets–a shocking 180-degree turn from their previous position. That’s how much management did not want us to move forward with these actions.
On February 11, less than a week after the practice pickets, PSU and UMass management reached an agreement that enshrined our right to our COLA pay, with no mention of merit.
In addition, PSU B managed to win a one-grade, across-the-board increase for all assistant food managers, who constitute one-third of the PSU B membership. Taken together with the last round of bargaining, this means that nearly every PSU B job title has received an increase of a grade or more over the last two rounds of bargaining. This came in the wake of PSU B’s recent wage-scale campaign, during which PSU B joined AFSCME and USA to introduce a joint proposal aimed at reducing the number of steps by half (from fourteen down to seven), thereby decreasing the number of years needed to reach the top of a given member’s wage scale. While this coalition did not win its wage-scale proposal during this last round of bargaining, they learned valuable lessons and will be back at the bargaining table together with their union siblings this spring.
The Path Forward
We’re all exhausted from fighting off management’s tactics, and one can be forgiven for wondering “when was the last time we won anything?”
This UMass administration took an aggressive position early on, coming out of the gate with takebacks and arguing that our reasonable proposals—such as COLA without merit—were “impossible.” Guess what: they’re always going to say it’s impossible. We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we proved that certain demands are possible when we remain united and resist management’s efforts to divide us. This was a “stand-your-ground” win, but it was still very much a win.
A special recognition goes to those who helped prepare the bargaining updates—our union is so much better informed because people stepped up and got involved.
Since it took an absurd amount of time to reach this agreement for our 2024-2027 contract, the next round of negotiations is—believe it or not—right around the corner. So now is the time to pat ourselves on the back, take a breath, and prepare for the next fight.
A proposal that we did not manage to win this time around was a wage scale for Unit A, through which every Unit A employee would receive annual pay increases on top of COLA until the top of a given position’s pay range is reached. This outcome is possible, but it’s going to take more numbers and a more united PSU—with a supermajority of members showing up, taking actions, and paying their dues. Once we have bolstered ourselves internally, we can start negotiations by giving management a message: business as usual depends on a fair (and timely!) deal for PSU.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice—which in our case includes a wage scale!
