UE in the News

Workers at Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania are celebrating the completion of their first union contract. The agreement comes after 20 months of negotiations with the reproductive health care provider.

The contract increases the hourly base wage for health care assistants, which make up the majority of the clinics’ staff, from $16 to $18. Crystal Grabowski, a health care assistant in abortion services and member of the union’s bargaining committee, said this disrupts a long history of undervaluing medical staff.

“Frontline health care workers are just notoriously underpaid and even more so for abortion access and reproductive access work,” Grabowski said. “Our roles are underpaid in terms of market rates. So to be able to significantly improve our wages was a huge win for us.”

Hannah Zadeh, president of COGS, said the protest was held to advocate for an increase in graduate employee wages. 

They said the state Board of Regents plans to offer a one-to-three percent raise for graduate employees, which does not meet the rising rate of inflation in the U.S. 

“We need a raise of above and beyond cost of living for it to be a real raise,” Zadeh said. “Anything less than that is a pay cut.”

Katie Despeaux is chief steward for the union. She says UNM officials have stated they cannot control how much research assistants are paid if the assistantships are funded by grants.

“I've gotten paid by grant money before, we can include our research assistants in this contract," she said. "They're just being stubborn and pushing back wherever they feel they can.”

On Tuesday, graduate workers were stopping traffic while trying to make their voices heard after another round of bargaining with the university.

“In one of the recent bargaining sessions, they informed us that they were going to try and make us start paying 20% of our insurance costs, which is currently not the standard, most departments are able to – graduate workers are able to have all of their insurance covered,” said Christian Rhoads, one of the picket organizers.

Rhoads is a graduate worker. In that recent bargaining session, he said UNM told them they also owe back pay on the past year of insurance costs.

As soon as the union started bringing up economic issues in negotiations, Rhoads said, the university told them they would try to use a state law allowing public-sector employers to only pay for 80% of their employees’ health insurance costs.

Not only did management want graduate workers to start paying for future health care insurance costs, Rhoads said, they also proposed graduate workers “pay them back for the past year of insurance costs since we’ve been recognized as employees.”

“Which, of course, is unacceptable,” he said. “That does not sit well with our membership.”