The University of Maine Graduate Workers Union reached a tentative agreement with the university system on Sunday.
The union reached an agreement with the University of Maine System after 761 days of negotiations, it announced on social media. The tentative contract includes health care cost cuts, stipend raises and non-discrimination protections for student workers.
Graduate student workers will vote on Tuesday and Wednesday on whether to ratify the agreement.
Roughly 900 graduate students hold working positions throughout the UMaine System, with 90% of them attending the University of Maine’s flagship campus in Orono. These students hold teaching and research positions across multiple campuses.
The contract secured a $4,000 raise in the minimum stipend amount for workers and lower health care premiums, with the cost covered by the university jumping from 50% to 65%, as well as another increase to 85% in the third and final year of the contract.
Elijah Bradshaw, a biology and ecology master’s student and member of the union bargaining committee, said “it took a really long time to get UMS to move up the status quo” for health care coverage, but the union got what it wanted, “for the most part.”
“We had some awesome wins in employee health insurance contributions, bringing us a bit closer to our peer institutions and getting dependent coverage as well as dental, which was huge,” Bradshaw said.
Union members will also receive a $750 one-time bonus for ratification within 60 days of the vote.
The contract “positions Maine’s public universities as a national destination for graduate student education, research and employment,” UMaine spokesperson Samantha Warren said.
Chancellor Dannel Malloy andUniversity of Maine President Joan Ferrini-Mundy, who is also the system’s vice chancellor for research and innovation, supported the contract’s ratification in a joint statement.
“We are proud to have achieved a tentative agreement that is both responsive to the needs of graduate student workers and reflects the increasingly constrained fiscal resources of Maine’s public universities,” Malloy and Ferrini-Mundy said.
Despite having Democratic candidates who are running for U.S. Congress and Maine governor attend rallies for the union as recently as last week, there was no singular factor that made the system buy into the tentative agreement, Bradshaw said.
This contract allows the future bargaining committees to work on a contract that brings more benefits for the graduate workers, Bradshaw said.
“At the end of this agreement, I would say we’ve set ourselves up for the next cohort of bargaining committee members three years down the line to make an even stronger second contract with even better protections, even better compensation and health benefits for the folks in the future,” Bradshaw said.