UIC deal ends 4-day strike; classes resume

After a nine-hour bargaining session Sunday — and months of negotiations — the University of Illinois at Chicago administration reached a tentative agreement with faculty and staff who had been on strike since Tuesday.

UIC United Faculty, the union representing 1,500 tenure and nontenure faculty at UIC, has been bargaining since April for a new contract that ensures increased pay, more funding for student services and job security, and had worked without a contract since Aug. 16.

After the union failed to reach an agreement during a marathon bargaining session on Jan. 16, union members headed to the picket lines Tuesday alongside students and organizers.

In November, 77% of their nearly 900 members voted in support of a strike.

Charitianne Williams, the UICUF’s communications chair and an English lecturer at the school, said the bargaining session ended late Sunday.

“We’re very, very happy with the contract,” she said. “I got home a little around 1 a.m. I haven’t stayed up that late since I was in my 20s.”

The final breakthrough came when both sides were hammering out the details of financial issues, she said.

“We had to do some trading to get that done, but we’re finally able to hit that $60,000 minimum for nontenure track, which was a real benchmark for us,” Williams said. “At one point we had 170 faculty observers in on the Zoom just listening in. The whole room just erupted as soon as we realized we had gotten what our membership needed.”

In a statement, UIC officials said, “This is the end of a long negotiation process. The parties were able to find common ground on an overall contract that addresses various faculty concerns and bridges the gap in compensation offers.”

Classes resumed Monday.

“Some of my colleagues on the bargaining team had class at 9:30 this morning; they were really happy to be back in the classroom,” Williams said.

Along with increasing minimum wage salaries for the lowest paid faculty, the new contract also provides stronger job protection for nontenure-track faculty, expands nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policies and promises a more robust system to deal with mental health issues with the same access to psychological and neuropsychological assessments for their students that the University of Illinois already provides to students at the Urbana-Champaign campus.

Last spring, UICUF sent a survey to its members to gauge which issues needed to be addressed at the bargaining table.

“Very, very, very quickly, student mental health emerged as the faculty’s No. 1 noneconomic workplace concern,” Williams said.

She noted that several faculty members spent an average of four to six hours per week talking to students about nonacademic issues over the last two years.

Last week, UIC’s administration announced that it would commit $4.47 million over the next six years to address student mental health and well-being.

According to university officials, funding will allow for increased staffing for the counseling center including licensed therapists and psychiatrists, and salary enhancements to recruit and retain staff. A social work trainee field unit is also on the docket, as well as the opening of a wellness drop-in space on the west side of campus.

Aaron Krall, UICUF president, said the key to getting over the finish line was the union’s strength in numbers.

Between 200 and 300 organizers showed up daily to protests that started Tuesday and lasted until Friday.

“I’m really proud of my team and all our members for coming out for the strike last week,” Krall said. “We formed our union with the goal of making UIC better. And sometimes they’ve been a willing partner in that and sometimes we’ve had to drag them along.”

The final part of bargaining is bringing the agreed-upon terms back tothemembersforavote, which Krall estimates will wrap up in the next couple of weeks. After that, the contract will get signed and sealed and things will start to go into effect immediately, Krall said.

The contract expires in August 2026.

“(I am) completely exhausted but at the same time, happy to get back into my work email and get back in touch with my students; it’s kind of exhausting and energizing at the same time,” said Krall, who teaches English and modern and contemporary drama.

“We talked about how this might go before the strike and everybody was a little anxious about it but definitely excited to get back to the real work we’re trying to accomplish at UIC,” he said.