Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that bargaining meetings will be open to the public. Bargaining meetings are exclusively open to MUWU members and Macalester representatives.
The formal collective bargaining process between the Macalester Undergraduate Workers Union-United Auto Workers (MUWU-UAW) and the college’s bargaining team began Friday, Jan. 30, in the Harmon Room of the DeWitt Wallace Library, following labor-management meetings held monthly last semester.
Collective bargaining is structured as a back-and-forth between a union and the employer, who exchange ideas and proposals in the hopes of ratifying a legally binding contract that determines certain conditions of employment.
At Friday’s bargaining session, MUWU-UAW presented Macalester representatives with nine initial proposals, including those that codified standards around safety, job postings and shift scheduling.
“This first set of proposals we gave were fairly uncontroversial,” Emily ’26, the external organizer for MUWU-UAW, who asked to use her first name only for security reasons, said. “I believe that this is something we can move forward with very quickly and get a decent start to our contract very soon.”
During Friday’s bargaining session, Macalester countered the proposal regarding severability. MUWU-UAW had proposed that the remaining contract provisions remain valid if “any court of competent jurisdiction … or Federal, State, or Agency regulation or decree” invalidates a portion of the contract.
The college’s counter-proposal struck out this specific language. The language around “Federal, State, or Agency regulation or decree.”
The college also proposed that meetings to replace any invalidated provisions take place “at no additional cost to the Employer, or, if none is available, at the lowest practicable cost to the Employer.”
Deb Ekeren, Macalester’s director of human resources and a member of their bargaining team, did not respond to The Mac Weekly’s question via email about why the college proposed these changes, although she did respond to other questions.
The union plans to discuss the counter-proposal at the next bargaining session on Friday, Feb. 13, according to a Jan. 31 email that bargaining committee member Mordecai Alba ’29 sent to student workers.
Following examples of other unions, MUWU-UAW brought simpler proposals at the beginning of the negotiation process. Bigger asks, which include economic proposals centering around topics such as health insurance and wages that would cost Macalester money, will come as negotiations move forward.
Before reviewing the nine proposals, the two sides had discussed proposed changes to the work schedule at Cafe Mac.
A Jan. 21 email from MUWU-UAW to student workers included charts detailing these changes. Some changes reflect unfilled shifts from last semester. For example, four out of five Friday breakfast shifts were unfilled last semester, and Cafe Mac offered only one Friday breakfast shift this semester as of the Jan. 21 email.
Other current shift offerings, however, are fewer than those left unfilled in the fall. For instance, last semester saw two of eight Sunday dinner shifts unfilled; only four Sunday dinner shifts were offered as of the email.
In the Friday negotiation meeting, MUWU-UAW claims Macalester had added more shifts to the Jan. 21 schedule. The Mac Weekly has not yet verified this claim.
Both bargaining teams agreed that their first meeting would be closed to the public. Accordingly, The Mac Weekly was not allowed to observe the negotiations. All following sessions will be open to the MUWU members and Macalester representatives.
In Emily’s view, the length of the bargaining timeline largely depends on how Macalester’s team receives MUWU-UAW’s proposals.
“The ball is really in the administration’s court, in terms of how long [bargaining] could take,” she said on Friday afternoon before the meeting. “This could take a month, this could take a year, depending on what admin does, and our power as students, enforcing them to the table.
“If we can have productive negotiations, I see no reason why we can’t get a significant way through the contract this semester or into the summer,” she continued.
Ekeren echoed hopes around cooperativity in the negotiation process.
“The Macalester team is committed to productive dialogue and good faith bargaining” Ekeren said in an email to The Mac Weekly.
“We are interested in understanding the union’s priorities and working toward an agreement that supports our student employees while maintaining the operations that are essential to Macalester’s mission.”
Attending the Friday meeting were five of six members of MUWU-UAW’s bargaining committee with support from Emily, MUWU-UAW Interim President Eliot Berk ’26 and UAW International Servicing Representative Laura Hebert. Present from Macalester’s LMC were Ekeren, Blenkush and Attorney Grant Collins from the Minneapolis law firm Felhaber Larson. Vice President of Administration and Finance Patricia Langer is also a part of Macalester’s bargaining committee, but could not attend the session due to prior travel plans, according to Ekeren.
The next bargaining meeting will occur on Friday, Feb. 13, at 2:15 p.m. in the Harmon Room.
