Setting the record straight on the status of the 2026 Brown-GLO contract negotiations
Dear fellow grad workers,
Yesterday morning, Provost Francis J. Doyle III and Executive Vice President Sarah Latham published a Today@Brown message concerning the status of Brown-GLO contract negotiations. In their statement, Provost Doyle and VP Latham presented a skewed picture of the current state of our discussions.
In the face of unprecedented inflation in the cost of housing and other essential goods since the 1970s, Provost Doyle and VP Latham attempted to paint their offer of 6.7% raises over five years as “fair.” These administrators, one of whom lives in a $2.5 million mansion provided by Brown, are proposing that we receive a 0% raise in FY27, 1.5% per year in FY28-30, and 2% in FY31. Set against historical inflation trends, this offer would constitute a guaranteed pay cut every year for five years straight.
While Brown cites fiscal constraints to justify this offensive offer, the university boasts a $2.5M FY25 operating surplus and an $853M increase in its endowment after cutting this year’s incoming PhD cohort by 20%. In brief, Brown could accept GLO’s initial stipend proposal and remain in good financial health.
On the subject of fellows, the provost and VP openly admit that both bargaining unit members and fellows “contribute to Brown’s research and teaching enterprise,” but at the same time claim that fellows are not required to perform services for Brown in exchange for funding. From our own experience, we know this claim, along with their claim that first-year fellows are not required to perform research, to be patently false. While stipends for fellows have historically been negotiated to be equivalent to the bargaining unit stipend, their inclusion in a side letter means the agreement lacks teeth; the University could violate its commitment to pay fellows the same rate as TAs, RAs, and Proctors with no ability to enforce the agreement through our union grievance procedure, as would be the case were it included in the contract proper.
Moreover, without formal recognition, fellows are not entitled to union representation nor protected by any other provision in our collective bargaining agreement. In effect, Brown is asserting that graduate workers on fellowship are second-class citizens and do not deserve the same rights as RAs, TAs, TFs, or proctors. State and Federal labor law mandates aside, Brown administrators can freely choose to recognize us as workers, but are actively choosing not to. In failing to do so, they are disrespecting the wishes of nearly 75% of fellows who have signed cards demanding union representation.
Notably, Provost Doyle and VP Latham failed to mention that Brown has sought to undermine the use of our independent grievance procedure to remedy workplace harassment and discrimination. They insist that their internal processes for addressing such cases are sufficient, but we know firsthand how untrue that is. When pressed at the bargaining table, Brown admitted that its internal processes have no timelines and produce non-binding outcomes. They expect us to rely on the Office of Equity, Compliance, and Reporting, which itself ultimately depends on federal enforcement. The result is that if any of us experience harassment or discrimination, we would be forced to put our trust in Brown to find itself guilty or in Trump’s Department of Education to intervene. For these reasons, the union contract’s grievance and arbitration procedure represents the most reliable mechanism for obtaining timely and binding remedies.
Provost Doyle and VP Latham frame Brown’s negotiations with us thus far as good-faith negotiations. Yet Brown offered virtually no substantive counters to our proposals throughout the spring semester, presenting responses to a quarter of our proposals mere days before the contract's expiration. This is hardly an example of an enthusiastic effort to bargain.
It is clear that we will need to increase the pressure on Brown to reach a fair agreement. Our next bargaining session is on Monday, July 13th, at 12 PM over Zoom—mark your calendars. If you’re ready to get more involved, please contact your Steward or reach out to us directly.
In Solidarity,
The Bargaining and Organizing Committees
