Today, Monday, June 30, is payday, and there are many reasons why this is a more significant payday than most others. For starters, this is the last payday of the 2007-08 academic year, and thus, for many of us, it represents the last paycheck we will receive from OSU until the end of September. In addition, this payday will bring a check for only half of a month’s work, meaning that some of us might have to scramble to make up for the other half of the pay we will not receive this month.

What really distinguishes this payday, though, more than by any other feature, is the fact that it will be the last payday under our current contract, and thus, as we have not settled in negotiations for this contract’s successor, we, as of tomorrow, will be working without a contract.

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Post WWII workers were the backbone of what was then a new American age of prosperity. Wages were comparable with the cost of living; this combined with a strong GI Bill for returning veterans created a strong, secure nation. The American workforce was educated, and well-paid. Families could afford to buy housing, and our educated workforce drove technological innovations which still place the United States as one of the most innovative and productive nations in the world.

We tend to forget that until the advent of strong union representation, American workers had no protection from unscrupulous business owners. The Great Depression was a time of unchecked corporate power, a time when private contractors were hired to beat and kill union organizers, a time when maiming and death were common industrial occurrences. It was the spirit of egalitarianism inspired by adversity, and an increasingly educated workforce that spurred the solidarity needed to stand firm against corporate power. Once unions were allowed to organize, no longer could an employer use human beings as disposable chattel to be discarded once they were worn or broken. People could be assured of a living wage, of health care, and of the opportunity promised by our Founders.

We once again face many of the same things we faced at the advent of the Great Depression. Once again corporate power is unchecked in the name of profit; lending institutions ply vulnerable customers with loans they no longer earn enough to repay and foreclosures are rife. Once again many employees struggle to survive on a minimum wage which is below the federal poverty level, and families are thrust onto the streets. The new union busters are corporations which place profits above national security. Wal-Mart, in the chase for profit has banned all union organizing in its shops, and many of its employees are also food stamp recipients. The taxpayers are subsidizing Wal-Mart’s employees because the company refuses to act responsibly toward its workers.

The ability to unionize, organize, and demand corporate accountability is a public good that we must not lose. Half a century of prosperity has lulled us into forgetting the struggles of those who laid their lives on the line so we could live a good life. When workers have to go the emergency room because it is the only way they can get treatment, when working parents have to depend on food stamps to survive, when corporate greed has caused recession, it is our national security which suffers. It is all of us who must bear the burden and just a few of us who profit. The ability of workers to freely organize, and the willingness of all of us to support American workers and demand corporate accountability is a step toward a stronger America. Please join me in supporting our unions and workers.

Adele Kubein
Oregon State University
Department of Anthropology

CGE thanks Adele for allowing us to print this piece.

Leave it to Friday the 13th to bring out the unexpected. It certainly happened this past Friday at the bargaining table when the Administration, for the first time, actually proposed a package that represents real progress in what have been to date incredibly frustrating negotiations. While their package is still a long way from what we are looking for, we were happy to see that they seem to be starting to change their ways, perhaps spurred on by testimony by State Representative Brad Witt and six CGE members at the previous week’s bargaining session.

Here’s a brief summary of some of the provisions included in the package they put forth:

• A contribution of 75% towards summer health insurance (the normal Pacific Source plan) for grads who were on an assistantship of at least 0.2 FTE for each of the three terms of the preceding academic year and who are “reasonably assured” of being on assistantship the following fall term; there are some issues with this, which I’ll discuss below
• An increase of $50 to the once-per-term lump-sum differential (from $250 to $300)
• A 3%-per-year salary increase for everyone who is paid at a 1.0-FTE rate less than $3164 a month until they are paid at a rate of at least $3164 (by our estimates, this would affect about 120 of the lowest paid grad assistants)
• Some additional rights for the union, including the right to use the university’s email system (i.e., to send email to our members’ OSU inboxes) and the right to introduce incoming grads in departments that don’t hold orientations to the union
• Convergence on some of the less exciting issues we’ve been bantering back and forth about for the past three months, including articles on discipline and discharge, the grievance procedure, and consultation
• Unfortunately, there was one major thing missing from their proposal: fair-share; at this point, any contract we sign must have fair-share; we will not go without it any longer.

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Come out and observe CGE’s next bargaining session this Thursday (6/19/08) from 9 to Noon in MU 212. See you there!

This past Wednesday (June 4), we had our most significant bargaining session to date. Trust me. When I say big, I mean BIG. Let me see if I can summarize everything that happened during the meeting in some bullet points first, and then I’ll get into some details.

• Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives and Democratic candidate for Oregon’s U.S. Senate seat Jeff Merkley kicked the morning off by talking in support of our efforts
• Six grad assistants and members of CGE testified to the administration on our key economic proposals; the administration seemed receptive to what they all had to say
• Gordon Lafer, a professor at the Labor Education and Research Center (LERC) at the University of Oregon, testified in support of our proposal on fair-share
• Oregon State Representative Brad Witt testified on behalf of 41 of his colleagues in support of our bargaining position; the administration got pretty defensive during his testimony

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Yesterday, CGE and OSU management met for the seventh time. Management promised a comprehensive response to all the issues we’ve raised in bargaining.

• On the key issues of salaries and fee relief, they’ve said “no:” no raises and no increases to the fee relief of $250 per term. Under Management’s current proposal, the only way for someone to get a raise is if the department wants to give a raise. (By the way, fees are going up by at about $60/year to pay for the right to get a football ticket. There are other fees increases as well. Departmental fees will not increase but things like building fees and technology fees could increase.)
• On the issue of email access, they’ve said that we can could start sending email to multiple graduate employees at one time. Clearly they are not in touch with reality. Anyone in the world can send email to multiple graduate employees at one time. Just go to any department’s personnel listing, copy and paste a few email addresses, type a message and press send. Presto! You’ve just violated the university’s email policy, and they won’t do anything about it, because this happens all the time.
• The bit of good news is that we might get summer health insurance, if the details can be worked out. This is certainly something that we are interested in and we are pleased that Management has brought this to the table. The CGE bargaining team is prepared to work very hard to get this in place for this summer. We’ll see what the administration is willing to do.
• The university is not willing to increase its contribution for health care beyond 75% of the single payer deductible.
• The university is not willing to increase its family friendliness. They are not willing to to contribute towards health insurance for spouses or dependents. Further, the university is not prepared to offer graduate employees specific money for childcare that is separate from what is already available.
• The university is not willing to grant us fair-share.
• On a variety of issues regarding the interaction between CGE and university, the university has made some movement.

Overall, the CGE bargaining team and the CGE members present were very displeased with proposal. Progress on summer health insurance is good. However, no increases in fee relief and no guaranteed raises are unacceptable because it does not guarantee graduate employees’ ability to keep up with inflation. It is distressing to see that OSU Management would not propose anything to make OSU more family friendly, via contributions to spouse and dependent health insurance and child. Not granting fair-share is unacceptable because it will keep the union weak. Fair share is something that OSU is not philosophically opposed to, as they collect fees set by student government. Second, of all the groups affiliated with campus, CGE is one of the largest (at nearly 360 members) and it is what our members want. Third, every other higher education related union in the state has fair-share, including OSU’s Service Employees International Union, the union for classified employees on campus. In other words, neither OUS nor OSU are opposed to unions having fair-share.

It sounds like the administration wants to make this a long summer.

After waiting on the Administration’s bargaining team for nearly 40 minutes, yesterday’s bargaining session began with the Administration’s team expressing frustration over CGE’s recent attendance and distribution of informational fliers at an OSU donor event. They felt their initial bargaining position had been misrepresented. Despite the fact that their initial proposal included eliminating from the contract the letter of agreement that gave grads the $250/term differential with no replacement, the administration felt it was unfair of CGE to characterize this (representing a wage cut of up to 13% for some grads) as their opening position. While the administration had indicated previously and reiterated that they wanted to hear what we wanted before they made changes to other financial portions of the contract, that’s what bargaining IS. There’s no point in this process at all if they won’t consider changes in their proposal based on what we want, but both teams agreed to state their initial positions in the first and second meeting. And I think CGE has every right to characterize their initial contract proposal as we have – elimination of the $250/term differential with nothing to replace it. In retrospect, it mostly seemed to me as though the Administration’s team had made its own bed, but then found it a bit uncomfortable to lie in (especially in front of wealthy donors).

After that unpleasantness, we went on to discuss important, but non-financial, parts of the contract:

- Article 17 on discipline and discharge of graduate employees

- Article 18 on grievances filed by CGE on behalf of grads

- Article 19 on Consultation between the administration and CGE

Our goal in these parts of the contract is to make sure that CGE and the grads we represent are in as good a position as possible to resolve problems with their supervisors or the administration.

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It’s been a while since we’ve posted here.  But that doesn’t mean the wheels of bargaining have not been turning.  We had two sessions in the last couple of weeks.

The first was extremely frustrating.  We left feeling like the Administration’s team really had no plans to actually negotiate with us and were instead simply entertaining us with their presence.  They started that session by immediately caucusing for nearly half an hour (or about a quarter of the allotted bargaining time), and when they came back they stonewalled us at every turn, refusing even to agree to try to move some of the less contentious stuff off the table in the first few sessions to try to build some harmony between the teams on our way up to the bigger stuff.

The second session seemed to go better.  We presented a few proposals we figured would be very non-contentious (like the articles on Discipline and Discharge, the Grievance Procedure, and Consultation [17-19]) and the Administration engaged us in a bit of back-and-forth about each one.  We’re hoping that they will come back to the next session (which is TODAY at 1:00 in MU 206) with some counter-proposals on these articles, so we can discuss them and move them off the table.

We’re also going to try to address the Articles on Appointments and Work Assignments (9 & 10) today.  There have been numerous issues with Grad Employees not having the time to prepare for assistantships due to their not being appointed or assigned their duties a timely fashion, and we are trying to work some remedies to this situation into the new contract.

So, some to the bargaining session today.  Your support really is important to us, and it shows the Adminstration that we’re all interested in this contract.  The session will last from 1-4:00, but you can come for any amount of time, and you can bring work to do while you’re there.  Your simple presence is what’s important.

The third round of negotiations will be held in the Westminster House on Monday, March 17, from 3-5 pm. This session will see the first round of real negotiations (as opposed to simply exchanging proposals, as the sides have done at previous meetings). Keep an eye on this post to see what specific issues we will be negotiating over.

We understand that the 17th is the Monday of finals week, but your contract is probably more important to you than a grade anyway, so we hope you’ll show up. This session may be the most interesting so far, since we hope to engage the Adminstration in a real back-and-forth over some important issues. We are especially looking forward to seeing how the University justifies some of its proposals, such as the elimination without replacement of the $250-per-term fee differential (i.e. a $750-per-year pay cut).

We hope to see you there. As always, feel free to come and go as you please, and bring some work to do if you want. Your simple presence is imposing enough.

Yesterday afternoon, the management of Oregon State and the Coalition of Graduate Employees laid out the their visions of the future. They are markedly different.

The CGE has a three-pronged approach to increasing every graduate employee’s total compensation:

1. Wage increases every year of the collective bargaining agreement for both the minimum salary and for every graduate employee based on their years of service.
2. A full fee waiver for every graduate employee.
3. Increasing OSU contribution to health insurance from 75% for the individual premium to 100% of the individual premium and 50% of domestic partner and family premiums. The OSU contribution would also be extended to include summer term.

To reiterate, CGE wants every employee with more money in their pocket. We want larger paychecks through raises, through an end to fees, and through a larger employer contribution to health insurance. By extending the employer contribution to health insurance, we want to increase graduate employees’ ability to take care of their families. By increasing OSU’s contribution on individual premiums from 75% to 100%, we are also preventing de facto wage cuts when premiums go up.

Management’s proposals on these three issues are dismal. They proposed eliminating any kind of a minimum salary, no raises and completely killing the $750 per year fee relief. That’s around a month’s rent, utilities and groceries. They think the current health insurance plan doesn’t need any improvement and didn’t really have any comment our proposed changes. Apparently the administration  doesn’t foresee any insurance premium increases. I do, and I see them as wage cuts. So, the adminstration’s position can be summed up as less pay for getting better at our jobs.

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