Coalition of Graduate Employees

Here’s what CGE has going on for the rest of the term:

• Bargaining Session: Friday, May 7th, 2-4 PM, MU Council Room
• Rep Meeting: Thursday, May 13th, 6 PM, Woodstock’s Pizza
• Bargaining Session: Monday, May 17th, 1-3 PM, Westminster House
• Association of Graduate Employee Locals Spring Conference: May 20th-23rd, Madison, Wisconsin
• CGE’s 10th Anniversary BBQ: Saturday, May 22nd, 1 PM, Maple Grove Shelter
• Bargaining Session: Friday, May 28th, 2-4 PM, MU Council Room
• Bargaining Session: Friday June 4th, 2-4:00 at Westminster House
• Bargaining Session: Friday June 11th, 2-4:00 in the MU Council Room

It’s a busy term, but we hope to see you at a few events!

CGE held the fifth bargaining session with OSU on Monday, April 26^th, 2010, at 1 PM in the Westminster House.  (It was on pretty short notice, in case you’re wondering why you didn’t hear much about it.)  On the agenda were Article 9 – Appointments, and Article 11 – Workload.

One quick note, before going into detail about the session:  The bargaining team has tried pretty hard to get as far as we can without asking the membership to do more than come observe sessions.  It became pretty apparent during the session that this isn’t working anymore, as the OSU team isn’t putting any real effort into coming up with solutions.  They seem to be more interested in stalling.  Expect to hear more from your Rep or the bargaining team about what you can do to work for a swift resolution and a good contract in the near future.

Article 9

There were no formal proposals exchanged; instead, OSU brought a guest to talk about OSU’s hiring practices as is and the teams had an hour-long discussion.  The discussion centered around CGE’s proposal to require that about 30 positions, all outside academic departments, be posted online when units are seeking to fill those positions.  We thought the solution would be pretty straight-forward. Instead, we were told that it would be a huge amount of work no matter how we did it.  Either that or we could do nothing, or accept positions being posted in a place that’s not accessible to incoming grads and that many current grads have not heard of.  Basically, we heard the words “no” and “can’t” a lot.

In the end, we agreed to continue the discussion later, and we’re going to dig in and do some research on how to make this work.  It’s somewhat inexplicable to the bargaining team that OSU would dig their heels in so much on this; one can only imagine the fit they would have thrown if we’d made more than a modest proposal.

Article 11

At the end of the previous session, OSU had agreed to give us a proposal on Article 11.  During that session, we’d had a productive discussion that culminated in the idea of a cap of 15% of one’s hours during any given week and 85% of one’s hours during the term.  It seemed reasonable to expect OSU to make a proposal along those lines – remember, the point is to give graduate employees more tools in those cases where people are being overworked, as well as help insure that grads aren’t asked to work 13 weeks’ worth of hours in 11 weeks, and we thought we had made that clear during the discussion.  Instead, OSU’s proposed solution to the problem of hour distribution did not mention anything we had discussed.  It was a single sentence that was nothing more than your typical, unenforceable contract language.  Rather than argue with OSU about the relative uselessness of their language and how they ever could have thought proposing such language would have been acceptable, we simply ignored it and presented our own.  They agreed to take our proposal and check with department heads and deans to see if it would be workable, and that’s where the session ended.

The next session is scheduled for Friday, May 7^th, in the Memorial Union, and starts at 2 PM.  As mentioned at the top of the post, we’ve hit the point where nice words aren’t getting us very far, so expect to start hearing from the bargaining team and your Reps soon about more actively supporting the bargaining team.

CGE met with the employer for the fourth time Monday, April 5^th.  The agenda was spare:  Discussion on Article 9 – Appointments and Article 11 – Workload.

Article 11 – Workload

The main discussion here was regarding CGE’s proposal in Section 3, which deals with the cap on the number of hours that can be assigned for a given FTE.  Based on comments the employer’s team had made during the previous sessions, the CGE team revised our proposal.  Essentially, we are concerned that people are working 13 weeks’ worth of hours during the 11-week academic quarter.

We had come to the table with a proposal that would prohibit people from working more than 11 weeks’ worth of hours during the 11-week quarter, but OSU interpreted the way we had presented it as giving units the option to pay people for 11 weeks and not 13.  The only faculty member in the room suggested rewording the proposal, and after some discussion in a caucus amongst our team and observers, the team agreed that it was a good idea.  We proposed, verbally, two additions to the current table of FTE and hours:  That no graduate employee be asked to work more than 85% of their appointment during the 11-week term, and that no graduate employee work more than 15% of their total assigned hours in one week (for a 0.49 FTE, 15% is 38 hours).  These were closely based on the suggestions from the faculty member on the employer’s team.  They agreed to respond with a written proposal at the next session.

There was also discussion of giving grad employees more tools to advocate for themselves in case they are on track to exceed their hours; the employer’s team seemed receptive to the ideas put forth by the CGE team.  Overall, the bargaining team is pleased with the progress made on this subject so far.

Article 9 – Appointments

The major proposal of CGE’s in this article was to require the 25-30 non-academic units that hire graduate assistants to post the positions in a central location, so that grads seeking employment knew where to look.  (As a side benefit, we think that doing this will increase the quality of the applicant pool for these positions, which benefits the units doing the hiring.  It’s really a win-win.)  The employer’s team balked strongly at this idea, claiming that it was too much work.  When the CGE team offered to host the job listings on the union’s website, the objection suddenly became that the employer didn’t have the authority to compel departments to send CGE information about open GA positions.

The CGE team is skeptical of both claims, given that the university does full hiring for both classified staff and faculty and can compel departments to allow CGE to present at orientations.  However, we are committed to the underlying goal of the proposal:  To increase transparency and accessibility in hiring.  We’ll continue to work with the employer to find a way to do this.

We are working with the employer to schedule another session and set the agenda.  We’ll let you know when we have something scheduled.

On March 3rd, CGE met with the OSU administration for the last of three bargaining sessions for winter term. (Due to finals and schedules changes, we’ll not meet again until spring term.)

The administration gave us their final initial proposal, on fees. Essentially, it will do nothing next year, but in the 2011-2012 year, the administration is offering to roll the Technology ($105) and Registration ($11) fees into tuition along with all departmental fees. This proposal is positive; however, their overall fees proposals, when paired together, are regressive for everyone but engineers, since they earlier proposed also rescinding the $300 per-term fee differential. Specifically, under the administration’s combined fee proposals, grad employees in Engineering would see a net gain of about $240 per term (before tax), while everyone else would see a net loss of about $190 per term.

Fortunately, the administration appears to have no intention of cutting the funding behind the $300/person per-term, and seems rather to wish simply to allocate it in a different form than the fee differential. In the coming weeks, our goal will thus be to work with the administration’s team to determine a way to reallocate these funds in a way that overcomes the regressiveness of their proposals on fees. In other words, we want to come out of these negotiations with an agreement that benefits all grad employees at the cost of none.

This work cannot be CGE’s alone though, and we let the administration know that we expect them to come to the next meeting with a comprehensive economic proposal that indicates areas where they might be willing to make economic changes that benefit all grad employees in the end.

A second item on the agenda for this meeting was for CGE to respond to the administration’s proposal on Article 8 – Union Rights. Essentially, they originally proposed that a) OSU would stop deducting dues for Associate Members; b) CGE should change the language on our membership card authorizing dues deductions (though they would refuse to clearly tell us how); and c) members would have to re-sign union membership cards every time they leave and re-enter the bargaining unit.

On (a), we pointed out that we consider Associate Members union members and not just donors. They had apparently never considered that possibility. We also pointed out that as we understand ORS 292.055, state employees can authorize a deduction to a union regardless of bargaining unit status. They promised to take a look at the information we provided them and get back to us. On (b), we’re still waiting for them to actually clarify what’s wrong with the current language, and on (c), we suggested that if the underlying problem is the complexity of deducting so many different dues amounts from people – which is what they told us was the problem they are trying to solve with their proposals – we could just move everyone into the BU and that would really simplify everything. They weren’t too enthusiastic about that suggestion, but it does solve the problem they told us they have more effectively than their proposal.

The final significant thing to note about this bargaining session was that, unlike the previous session, the administration’s team was far more polite and respectful. This may be attributable to the large contingent of grad employees who showed up to observe the entire meeting, despite several lengthy caucuses. Regardless of the reason for the administration’s friendly behavior, our team certainly appreciates it and hopes they continue to behave that way for the duration of bargaining.

We’ll have another session early in spring term. When we schedule it, we’ll let you know when and where it will be.

*The title of the post refers to this, in case you were wondering.

The CGE bargaining team met with the university’s bargaining team on Tuesday, February 23, at 3 PM in the Memorial Union Council Room. On the agenda: the presentation of all of CGE’s initial proposals and the presentation of some initial proposals from OSU. What follows is a short summary of the main things we took away from the session, and below the fold, a more in-depth recap, including all of the proposals both sides made.

1. OSU didn’t talk much about the contributions of graduate employees or the role graduate employees will play in making OSU a Top-10 land grant school. CGE talked a lot about those things.
2. OSU did, however, talk about how much graduate employees cost. They proposed to lower that cost by cutting the differential from $300/term to ZERO. However, we think they will be proposing to roll some fees into tuition on the 3rd, so we’re waiting to see what the net effect is before we counter propose.
3. Some members of the OSU team also were skeptical that the CGE bargaining team knew what graduate employee life is like. As the union’s bargaining team is almost exclusively graduate employees, this was surprising. It could also be a potential roadblock going forward.

Overall, the CGE team was surprised at the harsh tone taken by the university’s team. The union’s team had told the university from the beginning that we wanted bargaining to be more collaborative and less acrimonious, but so far that’s been a one-way street. The team was also disappointed OSU didn’t acknowledge either the contribution of graduate employees to OSU or the fact that the union’s bargaining team has firsthand experiences with the issues we brought to the table.

The next bargaining session is Wednesday, March 3rd, at 2 PM in Westminster House (directions here). We’ll hear OSU’s final fees proposal, which is on the topic of departmental fees. Having lots of observers in the room last time made a big difference in the level of civility coming from OSU’s team, so we hope you can spare an hour or two in the afternoon to support the bargaining team and support ending fees.

(More below the fold.)

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