Our team has tried to be reasonable in the benefits we are looking for this year. While it would be great to have no student fees, across-the-board raises, and 100% health care coverage year-round for all employees and their families, we realize all of that is not possible in one round of contract negotiations. Instead, we have expressed why each of these issues is important, and that we are looking for reasonable progress in each of these areas. Ultimately, we are asking OSU to make a real and significant investment in graduate employees. We are an essential component of OSU’s long-term strategic goals, and with the position of prosperity OSU has proclaimed itself to be in, we don’t view an investment in grads as unreasonable. What we have not heard from OSU is a clear commitment to make a real investment in graduate employees over the next four years that this contract will cover.

We responded to OSU’s position by making our position clear: Our membership has clearly demanded that we work to eliminate the burden of student fees on graduate employees. Next Friday we will see how OSU responds and if they are willing to listen to graduate employees’ needs. Based on OSU’s self-identified position of prosperity (President’s speech to Faculty Senate, October 2011), the ambitious strategic plan set out by President Ray, and the essential role that competitive graduate employees will play in such a plan, our team is serious about getting a contract that helps make OSU the top-tier university it wants to be. Student fees are a burden that creates resentment for graduate employees being forced to pay a significant portion of their stipend back to the University. Summer insurance coverage is necessary for us to stay healthy all year. Family health insurance coverage is necessary to make a graduate education accessible to all people and will keep graduate employees’ families off welfare. Increasing the minimum stipend is necessary to support TAs teaching core undergraduate coursework while earning wages above poverty levels.

Although we did not see the kind of commitment we are looking for from OSU on key economic issues today, their bargaining team has been working earnestly to make progress on important issues of mutual interest. Today we finalized language to bring our contract’s nondiscrimination language in line with OSU’s own language and to make a place in OSU’s safety committee for a CGE representative. This last point is a great example of how OSU and CGE can and should be partners with mutual interests. We hope OSU keeps recognizing that CGE can in fact be a partner and a valuable resource to OSU. We can help rally graduate employees to participate in events or on committees, we can tell OSU what they need to do to most effectively recruit the best graduates to advance its teaching and research goals, and we can make sure graduates are treated fairly and feel secure in their positions on campus.

We next bargain on Friday, May 25 at noon in Westminster House. Hope to see many of you there!

The session began with testimony from two witnesses about the need for a family and medical leave policy. Jessica Travers, a GTA in English, described her experience with uncertainty while trying to take maternity leave in Spring 2011. While she felt like OSU and her department were interested in helping her, the lack of a clear policy in the matter lead to a time consuming process where no one really knew what to do, and she was left with a great deal of insecurity in her future employment options. Trish Gregg, a postdoctoral scholar in CEOAS also testified about her experience talking maternity leave while on an NSF postdoctoral fellowship. As a response to her request for leave, the NSF has instituted a new policy promoting family leave that serves as a model for academic institutions.

At this point, the CGE bargaining team really wanted to hear what OSU is thinking about regarding a family-medical leave policy. We know that the Graduate School worked on a draft policy last winter, but OSU’s bargaining team has yet to clearly state what part of that policy they are interested in incorporating into our contract. Hopefully OSU can bring us a clear idea of what they are prepared to do soon.

The rest of the session focused on where we are with previously discussed items. We gave OSU a summary of survey data regarding expected enrollment of dependents and partners at different levels of employer health insurance premium coverage. They gave us a cost estimate (about $185k) for increasing summer health insurance coverage to 85%. They also stated that because our Pacific Source Health plan is an employee plan, they could only offer it while we are not employed when we have a reasonable expectation of being employed the following term. It was unclear why the plan has to be inflexible at this last point, but OSU’s team did agree that covering COBRA coverage for this period would be one way around it, although they did not indicate that was something they were prepared to do.

OSU also suggested they could be open to addressing the Matriculation Fee (the $300 fee every graduate employee pays their first term), but that they were NOT interested in dealing with the building fee, incidental fee, or health services/counseling fee. One important point we were able to make was that ALL fees are subject to approval by OSU including those passed by ASOSU or a student vote. The vote is only a recommendation. We again emphasized that reducing student fees is our top priority and that with the $300/term differential, we are over halfway to having all fees covered. It appears at this point that OSU’s leadership is not ready to make any groundbreaking progress on this issue.

Where does this leave us? Fundamentally, we are now making a major transition in Interest-Based Bargaining (IBB) from investigating the impacts of financial proposals and potential barriers to a fundamental question of what OSU is willing to invest in. OSU’s lead negotiator suggested she knows how to approach this with traditional bargaining but not with IBB. CGE’s team certainly hopes we can capitalize on the advantages of IBB and avoid the traditional positional bargaining where OSU makes ridiculously limited proposals and starts out with a realistic financial offer.

Interested in seeing how this turns out? Our next bargaining session is almost here! It will be on Wednesday May 16 from 1-3 pm in one of the agricultural rooms of La Salls-Stewart. Hope to see you there!

On Wednesday April 11 we presented our proposed changes to health insurance for graduate employees. We have three major goals in this area: (1) increasing OSU’s coverage of premiums over the summer to the same amount as the during the rest of the year (currently 85%), (2) making this period of coverage more flexible by changing it from summer term coverage to a 3 month coverage available anytime employment lapses, and (3) beginning employer contributions to partner or dependent premium coverage.

The case for partner/dependent health insurance coverage was first laid out with testimony from graduate employee Eric Cram. His statements spoke to the hardship of having to pay for dependent health insurance premiums on a graduate assistant salary without any employer contribution. While OSU’s team seemed to understand the reality of this situation, they seemed more concerned about the difficulty of projecting costs of such a program. We did get their team to agree to work with us to gather data to make so we can make a reasonable estimate of what costs partial coverage of dependent premiums would be.

OSU seemed surprisingly receptive to our case for increasing the premium coverage over summer term. They readily agreed that the 50% coverage currently available results in a low percentage of people enrolling over the summer due to high costs. We all want graduate employees to be able to count on health insurance coverage year-round. Our idea to change the summer coverage to a more flexible coverage that would extend for any three-month period after employment was met with acknowledgement that it would simplify administration of health insurance for Student Health Services.

Although not a key point, we also discussed administration of health insurance waivers. OSU brought up general concerns with employees not completing waiver forms properly or in a timely manner, but had not suggestion on how to fix this issue. We suggested the waiver requirements should be more flexible, only requiring equivalent medical coverage regardless of optical or dental options.

Overall, the negotiations over health insurance were similarly productive to previous sessions using Interest-Based Bargaining. Instead of refusing to even consider items for which cost estimates would be uncertainty, OSU agreed to research alongside CGE data that could put reasonable constraints on costs that would allow us to move forward.

Unfortunately, the following negotiations on Friday April 20 were not as productive. A number of witnesses along with our team first presented the difficulties and resentment graduate employees feel towards student fees at OSU. We highlighted that this is ALWAYS the NUMBER ONE issue our members tell us before bargaining. Since OSU already provides $300 per term in a differential payment, they are over halfway towards eliminating the fee issue altogether and conclusively addressing the biggest concern graduate employees bring to the table every year in bargaining. We also presented the case for the need to increase salaries, especially in light of the rapidly rising costs of rent in the Corvallis area. Our surveys have shown that 57% of graduates had their rent increase since last year, with the average increase over 13%.  We gave a presentation that demonstrated that the costs grads face are about two and half times the current minimum salary – even the federal poverty line is one and half times what the lowest paid earn.  We hope that OSU recognizes the need for raises, even Graduate School has released a report saying the lowest paid graduate employees do not receive enough compensation (the Graduate School’s suggested cost of living is over twice the current minimum salary).

Unfortunately, instead of addressing our concerns, OSU’s team instead felt very focused on considering compensation coupled with our tuition waivers. We find it very unlikely that OSU is actually interested in reducing or eliminating tuition waivers (and the mass exodus of graduate employees that would follow) so these comments contributed nothing to the issue at hand. We stated very clearly that our major interest in addressing fees and salary is to provide graduate employees security to deal with yearly increasing in cost of living and allow those of us who contribute to OSU’s mission as employees to be able to have a reasonable standard of living and not accrue additional debt. The reality is, increasing salaries and reducing fees is a cost to OSU. It is a cost, however, that recognizes the important contributions in research and teaching graduate employees have shouldered that has allowed OSU to be in the relatively secure financial position it proclaims to be in today.

We have a three-week break until our next bargaining session on Friday May 11 from 12-3 pm in Westminster House. Hopefully in this time OSU will be able to seriously look at the issues we have raised and can come prepared to start committing to making changes that will give graduate employees fair compensation while making OSU more competitive and productive.

Overall, this was a really productive session. We were pleased that OSU had brought witnesses that provided meaningful context for our conversations, and we felt we were able to work toward mutually beneficial solutions. We’re looking forward to moving forward on each of the areas discussed in more detail below, and crafting specific language that best meets everyone’s needs. So far—two big thumbs up to interest based bargaining!

Here are the ideas we worked on:

Creating a CGE Position on the University Health and Safety Committee (UHSC) — In the last session, we demonstrated an interest in having a more prominent role for grad employees in dealing with lab and workplace safety issues. Heidi Melton (Human Resources, former UHSC Chair) attended this session and helped lay out the current structure of the UHSC. She noted that there have been grad students on the committee in the past, but that they have not tended to maintain the commitment. Both CGE and OSU recognize an interest in having a grad serve on the UHSC. We pointed out that having that position appointed by CGE would better guarantee that grads would remain active on the committee. Moreover, we suggested that having a direct link between CGE and the UHSC would be a proactive solution that could preempt grievances and other workplace safety issues. OSU will make a request of Mark McCambridge (OSU VP Finance and Administration) on our behalf to pursue the creation of a designated spot on the committee for a CGE representative. OSU also seemed willing to revisit the 3 year term of service to accommodate the fact that few grads would be able to commit to a 3 year appointment.

Increasing Faculty/ Staff Parking Permits for Grad Employees — At present, CGE is allotted 20 faculty/staff parking permits that can be purchased by interested grad employees. In the last few years, interest has outpaced demand, and CGE has released them by lottery. We suggested that in light of this and the general increase in parking demand, it might make sense to release more faculty/staff permits for grad employees. OSU brought Hank Kemper from TAPS to give a little background on the parking situation on campus and to help explore other ways of addressing our concerns. Ultimately, it seemed that many grad employees would still desire the opportunity to get a faculty/staff permit. Hank seemed to suggest that this would be manageable as our 20 permits are only a “drop in the bucket”. OSU was unsure if increasing the number of permits available would effectively address our needs, but they didn’t seem opposed to the idea. Vicci Henry from OSU’s team and folks from CGE will attend the Parking Committee meeting at 10 AM on April 20 in MU 207 to state our case, and we’ll move forward from there. If increasing the permits available to grad employees won’t significantly burden the system and the committee approves the request, OSU is amenable to the change.

E-Campus Tuition Waiver Letter of Agreement — In January, we signed a letter of agreement establishing a one-year trial program that would give all graduate employees access to E-Campus courses under the standard tuition waiver. The letter also details that CGE will be included in the decision as to whether or not to continue the program at the expiration of the trial period. In bargaining today, we simply agreed to add that letter of agreement to the contract.

3 Credit Post-Employment Tuition Waiver — At the first session, we mentioned an interest in providing 3 credit tuition waivers to grads who, for whatever reason, need to defend the term after their employment ends. OSU seemed to agree that this could be beneficial both to grads and the University, as it would remove a financial obstacle to degree completion. We don’t yet know how many people such a wavier might apply to, but the OSU team has been looking into figuring out an approximate number. We agreed that idea might best be addressed by a subcommittee that could look into possible funding models and find a workable and equitable solution. CGE and OSU were able to draft a document that laid out the interest and questions that would need to be addressed. The subcommittee will get to work on figuring out the practicalities of how such a plan would be funded—centrally or through departments—and what mechanisms would need to be in place to make this feasible.

Up Next — Here’s what we’ll discuss on April 11th:
Health insurance (witness: George Voss)
Family & medical leave for grad employees (witness: Brenda McComb)
Update on the 3 credit post-employment tuition waiver
Update on the UHSC CGE position

Future Dates — Clear your calendars for these dates (exact times soon, will be in the afternoon):
April 11th, April 20th, May 11th, May 16th, & May 25th