2025-2028 Bargaining Blog: Session 6

Hi everyone! After a bit of a break, we are back with another session recap. The plan for our most recent session was to apply some pressure and get a response for our Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that we issued our first session, where we are requesting additional protections for GAs in the face of the federal funding freezes, cuts, and the like. To do this, we told the FSU-BOT team that we would not pass over our list of article status’ until we received a response on the MOU. However, after some further discussion, we issued the list regardless, as a show of good faith and to maintain our reasoned approach to this full book bargaining season. 

The FSU-BOT team did respond to the MOU, where we discussed how many of the requests are detailed in article two, which is in tentative agreement. There are some other requests that we made that fall too closely to the line of academics, and the FSU-BOT team would be unable to provide protections in that area. All these things considered, we still are in conversation with FSU-BOT about the MOU, and plan to propose some new protections that would bridge the gap, and would still be considered employment protections. 

We accepted changes for article fourteen, and issued our counter proposals for article five and article twelve. We had important conversations about the importance of publication for GAs’ careers, how publishing figures into academic freedom, and how we are better able to access bargaining unit data while still being denied a bargaining unit list. 

This session was a productive one, and we had some very promising conversations. FSU-GAU looks forward to moving towards some larger bargaining issues, while still maintaining our work on these non-financial asks. If you’re interested in bargaining, please feel free to reach out to the bargaining email, bargaining@fsugau.com. To stay up to date with everything bargaining, follow our instagram @fsugau and stay up to date on our website, fsugau.org. 

With Love & In Solidarity, 

Xanthippe Pack-Brown

FSU-GAU Bargaining Chair