Bargaining Mediation Recap: 4/8/2026
After twelve hours of mediation in the Richard and Maurine Neuberger Center, your bargaining team stepped out into the darkness last Wednesday night feeling weary but cautiously optimistic. You and your fellow adjuncts have spent the last fourteen months fighting an administration that has done everything it can to try to undermine your collective power. Every step of the way, you have resisted and struck back in an unprecedented strike readiness campaign. Thanks to your solidarity, your bargaining team has finally begun to see some glimmers of hope.
When the parties arrived Wednesday morning for a joint introductory session overseen by the mediators, it became clear that the University’s team had, once again, put little to no effort into preparing proposals for the most essential articles of your contract. Your bargaining team, though, had been able to explain the stakes of the conflict to the representatives from the state’s conciliation services, who learned about the two cases of unfair labor practice violations (1, 2) and the administration’s obstructionist conduct at the negotiation table, and who came to understand your needs and priorities as the essential faculty workers on this campus. By the end of the day, the management team had been successfully prodded into assembling a series of confidential proposals—a set of offers that admin, frankly, could have made to you at any point in the last year. Though the administration and its lawyers have finally provided a months-overdue starting place for reasonable negotiation, it is clear that it will take more agitation to transform their lukewarm provisions into the fair contract that you deserve.
With continued pressure from you and your fellow adjuncts, it is possible that your bargaining team will be able to get the University to meet the key demands of your platform:
Fair pay
Preserved benefits funds
Strengthened job security
Academic freedom protections
Safeguards against AI exploitation
The April 8th mediation session marked the start of our 15 day countdown toward “impasse,” the next step toward a legally allowable strike. If management fails to provide what you need to support your students by the end of Week 4 of this term, your bargaining team can declare impasse. After impasse has been declared, there is a 30-day “cooling off” period, during which the mediators will continue to facilitate bargaining. If the administration and its lawyers still fail to live up to their responsibilities, then you and your fellow adjuncts will have legal sanction to invoke your essential power as workers—the right to withhold your labor in a strike.
In the wake of the successful strike action by our colleagues at PCC, PSU’s administration has seen what can happen when an administration underestimates its workers. The University knows that it cannot meet its commitments to students without your labor.
How can you continue to build our leverage? Pledge to strike now to make sure that the administration backs down from its obstructionist agenda and delivers on its obligations to adjunct faculty by the Week 4 deadline.
Join your colleagues at the upcoming We Are Worth More picket and march, April 22nd.
In person is our biggest show of strength: April 22 We Are Worth More Picket, 12:40–1:30 pm
For remote workers: April 22 We Are Worth More VIRTUAL Picket (email campaign) DETAILS FORTHCOMING
Learn more about the bargaining process and the power of withholding your labor by signing up for a PSUFA Strike School May 6th or 16th. See where the negotiations currently stand by consulting the bargaining issues tracker and catching up on the latest bargaining recaps here on the PSUFA website.