UA Resumes In-Person Negotiations with AGWA

March 19, 2024

This week, UA is returning to previously scheduled in-person negotiations with AGWA on March 18-19. UA had asked AGWA to pivot slightly and use the Feb. 27-29 in-person negotiation session for our chief negotiators to work through our lack of alignment on ground rules.

Reaching an Understanding: UA was able to reach a degree of mutual agreement with AGWA on the ground rules, which is why in-person negotiations are resuming.

  • The mutually agreed upon ground rules call for closed negotiations to protect the integrity of the process and ensure that UA and AGWA can work through potentially challenging issues productively.

Why It Matters: Any successful negotiation requires the parties to be on the same page. The University’s negotiating team wanted to ensure that was the case while they continued working on this first collective bargaining agreement.

What’s Been Happening: The negotiation process continued even in the absence of in-person bargaining. 

  • UA has continued to exchange articles and other information with AGWA over email, including responses to a large request for information from AGWA, and returning multiple article proposals during the last week of February.
  • Behind the Scenes: UA has continued to conduct detailed and thorough fiscal, legal, and technical reviews of AGWA’s proposed articles to aid in the negotiation process.

What’s Next: There is no timetable for how long negotiations will take. As we’ve previously communicated, first contract negotiations with entities across the country have taken more than 400 days on average, depending on their complexity. Regardless, UA has been and will continue to negotiate in good faith with AGWA to reach an initial contract.

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