Coalition of Graduate Employees

CGE has continued its proud progress into the 21st century by getting our own Twitter feed: @CGE6069. We’re planning to be active twittering during bargaining sessions, so if you can’t make it to a session, you can at least follow our feed to keep up with what’s going on.

Our first real bargaining session for the 2010 reopener is coming up on Friday, February 12. It’ll be from 2-5:00 in the large meeting room in the Westminster House (not the MU; note the location change).

At this session, we’ll be letting the OSU administration know which articles we plan to open this year, and they will then do the same. Afterwords, we’ll begin to lay out the context of bargaining as we see it this year, which is the basis upon which we’ll make and fight for our proposals.

This will be an interesting session, and afterwards we hope to have an idea what OSU is thinking. We could definitely use your support, so come out for all or part of the session if you can make it. You can even bring homework to do or papers to grade.

Update 12/9/2009: The bargaining platform has been approved, with a vote of 98 for to 2 against.

11/19/2009: The CGE bargaining team has completed its work drafting our 2009-10 bargaining platform.  This platform broadly outlines our goals going into negotiations this year as well as our rationale behind them.  You can download a copy below.

• CGE 2009-10 Bargaining Platform

Approval of this platform is pending a vote by the CGE membership.  This vote will be held online and will be open until December 4.  You can access the voting site through the following URL:

• http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/208700/cge-2009-10-bargaining-platform-vote

Voting is open to CGE members only.  If you are a current CGE member, you will be emailed a unique ID to use to identify yourself as a member on the voting website.  While each member’s ID is unique, they will not be associated with members’ names, so your vote will remain anonymous.

Please feel free to use the comment section of this post as a forum to discuss the platform online.  You can also contact CGE directly with any questions you have.

Results of the vote will be published at cge6069.org when the polls close on December 4.

Today, CGE and OSU held an arbitration hearing over the $34 Summer Session Tuition Base grievance.  Though we can’t discuss specifics, we were happy with the way the hearing went.

We and OSU will submit briefs (summaries of our respective cases) to the arbitrator on Dec. 10.  After that, we will have up to 10 days to decide whether to submit a rebuttal to OSU’s brief and to do so if we so choose.  Then, the arbitrator will have up to 60 days to reach a decision.  That means that we should receive a decision on this case some time in February.

We are looking forward to receiving the arbitrator’s decision and will keep everyone up to date.

In an unexpected turn of events, OSU has repudiated the settlement they themselves had agreed to earlier in the summer over the $34 summer session tuition base grievance.  Their refusal to sign the agreement came after CGE filed a new grievance because grad employees were again forced to pay the summer session tuition base for the 2009 Summer Session.  Considering the fact that the settlement contained language specifically reserving CGE’s right to grieve over future violations related to the summer session tuition base, we see OSU’s repudiation as  retaliatory, and for this reason, we are considering filing an unfair labor practice against OSU.

In the meantime, we will proceed to take the 2008 grievance to arbitration.  A hearing on this case is currently scheduled for November 23.  We will also continue to push the 2009 grievance through the grievance procedure outlined in our contract.