Catherwood LibraryILR School

Thursday night the University of Illinois at Chicago?s faculty announced that they will strike for February 18th and 19th. The faculty union feels that the administration is not bargaining in earnest due to the administration?s unresponsive attitude and ?intentional? difficulty in scheduling. The faculty?s union wage proposal was more than twice that offered by the administration and no progress had been made on non-monetary issues. The union covers 1,150 faculty, both tenured and nontenured, and was founded in 2011, making it the first such union at a major public research university in Illinois. The union was authorized in December by its members to strike this semester if a contract was not reached. A federal mediator has been involved in the talks since November, but still little progress has been made.