Coalition of Graduate Employees

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.

(Continue reading...)