To: Wellesley College Faculty and Staff
From: Courtney Coile, Provost and Lia Gelin Poorvu ’56 Dean of the College, and Carolyn Slaboden, Chief Human Resources Officer
Re: WOAW-UAW Contract Negotiations
Date: September 12, 2024
We hope your academic year is off to a great start. We write to share important information about the contract negotiations underway with the WOAW-UAW, the union representing a group of non-tenure track (NTT) faculty at Wellesley College. We have been negotiating with the WOAW-UAW since May to reach a first contract, and discussions at the bargaining table have thus far been thoughtful and productive.
Wellesley deeply values and respects the faculty in the bargaining unit, each of whom plays a vital and distinct role in enhancing the College and supporting our academic mission of excellence. We have been and remain fully committed to bargaining with the union in good faith to reach a fair contract. With that said, it’s important to understand that negotiating a first contract can take significant time. First-time contracts often take more than a year of negotiations to complete. We are confident we can reach an agreement with the WOAW-UAW that’s fair and responsive to the members of the bargaining unit, while also serving the needs of the broader community.
We are making good progress: We are currently working through a number of proposals from both sides, and we are pleased to have reached tentative agreements on several of them, including severability, job postings, discipline and discharge, and the creation of a union-management committee.
While we hope to reach agreement on other proposals in the coming weeks, there are areas under discussion in the collective bargaining process that are critical to Wellesley’s mission and operations—and to our wider faculty community. These key issues, such as academic freedom, workload, and compensation, require us to consider carefully the impact on the entire Wellesley community.
As we continue this work, we will keep you informed about our progress and share background on our approach to key topics. To this end, we have created a dedicated website that includes the core principles guiding our approach to negotiations as well as detailed updates on the process and the College’s positions. If you have questions, you can use this form to submit them. We will be posting answers on a regular basis.
We look forward to continuing to engage in good faith bargaining later this month and in October, and to updating you in the weeks to come.
