Coalition of Graduate Employees

2 PM at Westminster House.  The university will be presenting a comprehensive package proposal, so come find out what they have to say!

Last Friday’s bargaining session was one of those sessions that didn’t look like much but might turn out to be important.  We continued discussing announcements of grad assistant job openings and workload issues, and we delved briefly into the more technical dues deduction procedure.  The CGE bargaining team left the session feeling that the discussion was substantive and encouraging overall.

Article 9 – Job Opening Announcements

The CGE bargaining team came to the table with a proposal on advertising (some) open grad assistant positions that was substantially different than our previous proposals.  In fact, we basically wrote down what the employer had been suggesting we do for the past two sessions: that the 30 or so positions not housed in academic units have job announcement info sent to OSU Today, the daily email that goes out all over campus.

Did they agree to their own idea?  No, of course not.  Instead, they claimed that no one at the university has the authority to require hiring units send position announcements to OSU Today and instead suggested that the contract simply “recommend” non-academic employing departments post grad assistant job openings in OSU Today.

From the bargaining team’s perspective, a contract is not the place to put language like “recommended.”  It is the place for language like “required.”  So we’re sticking to that.  And, after a lengthy discussion about this and an open expression of exasperation at the OSU bargaining team’s apparent unwillingness to engage the CGE bargaining team on this issue in a meaningful way, OSU made what appeared to be a sincere commitment to look into the feasibility of this.  We will see whether anything meaningful comes of that commitment.

Article 11 – Workload

The two bargaining teams had some discussion on the proposal made by CGE at the previous session, and the CGE bargaining team continued to make what we think is a compelling case for reasonable restrictions on the number of hours grad employees can be required to work during the 11-week academic term.  Unfortunately, it appeared that the OSU team hadn’t done enough work in the two weeks since the previous session to actually be able to reach any decisions on anything.  However, they did agree to come back with another proposal on this issue at a future session.

If you’re getting the sense that not much happened during this session, you might be right.  At this point, it certainly appears that OSU’s bargaining team is simply not doing the requisite work they need to do to make progress in bargaining.  They, of course, deny this, and so far, we’re taking them at their word.  During this session, the CGE team noticed signs that OSU may be nearing a point where they can agree on some of the issues we’ve been discussing, but we have been optimistic about this in the past with nothing to show for it.  The next few sessions, as we try to wrap up non-economic items and move into economics, should prove to be telling.

We’ll see you at the next session, on Monday, May 17^th, at 1 PM in the Westminster House, where the CGE offices are located.

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.