Coalition of Graduate Employees

The CGE bargaining team is extremely happy to announce that we reached tenative agreement with the OSU administration today on a complete contract. Full agreement is contingent on ratification of the new contract by the CGE membership, which will take place in the coming weeks. This agreement came during the last session before the teams could have chosen to enter into mediation, and we see it as a major victory. Details of the agreement, which calls for a four year contract with a reopener of up to 6 articles after 2 years, are below. (Continue reading...)

It’s been quite some time since we’ve posted an update on negotiations, partly because we’ve been so busy negotiating, preparing for negotiations, and taking action in support of negotiations, but none of that excuses us from keeping you loyal members up to date. With that in mind, here’s an update on all that’s been going on since we last wrote.

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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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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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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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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 fourth round of contract negotiations between the CGE Bargaining Team and the OSU Administration will be held TODAY, Monday, April 7, from 1-4:00 pm in MU 206. At this meeting, we’ll be beginning the long road of negotiations trying to build accord by talking about some uncontroversial, non-economic issues.

As always, we need your support. Stop by for as long as you’d like today to observe part of the session.

The second round of CGE-OSU negotiations will be held from 3-5 pm on Wed., March 5, in room 206 in the MU.

Things started to get a little contentious at the last meeting, and we didn’t even talk about any of the more sexy articles (as Brett, our master lead negotiator, calls them). At this meeting, we’ll introduce some of our economic proposals, including ones on salary and fee relief and, if we’re fast, health care and child care, so the proceedings should be riveting.

To date, the Administration seems to be looking only to maintain (or perhaps regress from) the status quo, while our vision includes many improvements to the current contract.

We’re hoping to get a huge contingent of observers to come out to this meeting to support that vision. We’re planning to meet at 2:45 in MU 206 to review what’s happened so far and to give a briefing about what to expect at this meeting. (A little bird told me there might also be some sort of social gathering involving refreshments immediately after the meeting.) If you are interested in observing, you can come for any amount of time. What is really important is that you show your support.

We held our first bargaining session yesterday on our home turf, the Westminster House. Though we have been preparing for these negotiations for a long time, this the first real taste of bargaining for many of us on the team, including myself, and I must say that this first round was an educational experience, to say the least.

In particular, I, the rest of the bargaining team, and all the observers present learned one very important fact: the University Administration truly has no vision beyond the status quo about what life and employment should be like for its Graduate Employees. To me, that comes as somewhat of a surprise because every time we talk to the Administration, we and they agree that to transform OSU into a top tier institution, which is one of the Administration’s stated goals, we have to be able to attract the best and the brightest graduate students to drive the research that goes on here. To be able to do so, it seems obvious that OSU must offer a package to its Graduate Employees that at least compares with ones offered by other top tier schools. In a recent meeting CGE President John Osborne, CGE VP Bargaining Joe Tyburczy, and I discussed this very topic at length with the top levels of the University Administration, including President Ed Ray, Provost and Executive Vice President Sabah Randawa, Vice President for Finance and Administration Mark McCambridge, and Director of Human Resources Jacque Rudolph.

When it comes right down to it, though, the Administration makes it clear that, while it’s nice to talk about improving the lives of OSU’s Graduate Employees, it has no real plans to actually do so. Their approach to bargaining with us makes this fact quite obvious and, in fact, might be taken as suggesting that the Administration thinks our lives are too good already.

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We at CGE are not usually the type of people who like to toot our own horns, but, I must say, the Winter ‘08 GMM truly rocked. As beer flowed free and cold from Clod’s tap and nachos abounded from their kitchen, we introduced our new Organizer (Dennis) and our new VP Organizing (Melissa), talked about how CGE has been kicking ass since the Fall GMM (including our successful Winter membership drive), and anticipated the impending birth of our VP Comminication’s (Allison’s) child.

With no baby forthcoming, Joe (our VP Bargaining) and Brett (our master lead negotiator) gave a rousing update on this year’s contract negotiations, and we had a discussion about the proposals—including full fee relief and cheaper, better, and more over-the-summery health care—we’ll be making to the university. In the end the membership was psyched about the contract we’re working for and unanimously endorsed all of our proposals.

Afterwards, we elected 5 delegates to head to Sunriver in April to attend the 56th annual AFT Oregon Convention, where by day they will conduct serious Union business—such as deciding how your dues are spent and plotting AFT Oregon’s legislative agenda for the year—and by night party with our brothers and sisters from the GTFF.

The meeting, unfortunately, was not without a touch of poignancy, as we concluded with a farewell to Chad, our long-time Organizer, who’ll be taking a job helping his fellow servicemen with the VA in Roseburg.

After the official business, a big group of us stuck around and learned how to insult people in foreign languages, shared stories about Wisconsin Dells, The Waterpark Capital of the World!®, and had another pitcher of free beer.

All things considered, this was unquestionably the best general membership meeting so far in 2008. We’re hoping we can say the same thing again in the Spring.