Coalition of Graduate Employees

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.

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This past Friday, the CGE bargaining team met with the OSU administration’s bargaining team in the first session of the 2010 contract reopener. Joining to observe the meeting and to support the CGE bargaining team were 30 or so graduate employees.

At the table, the two bargaining teams exchanged lists of the articles each plans to open for negotiation this year. The articles being opened by each team are listed after the jump.

After the exchange of articles, the CGE bargaining team broadly outlined our bargaining platform and explained that our prime focus this year is to make progress where our own goals align with the long-term goals that have been articulated by the OSU administration in recent months.

Specifically, we believe that the teaching and research performed by graduate employees at OSU is foundational to all of OSU’s long-term goals. However, as the CGE bargaining team explained, major changes will be required in the way graduate employees are compensated for their good work in order to achieve those goals. In particular, as long as the minimum guaranteed graduate employee salaries at OSU fall next-to-last when stacked against the salaries earned by graduate employees at OSU’s 11 comparator institutions (with a minimum salary at 0.49 FTE more than $350/month less than the average minimum at those comparator institutions), as long as hundreds of graduate employees are paid below-poverty-level wages, and as long as the average graduate employee at OSU doesn’t even earn as much as OSU’s own estimated cost of attendance, OSU will find it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain the kind of talented graduate employees whose work will be required to drive OSU to achieve its long-term goals.

The presentation given by the CGE bargaining team outlining OSU’s long-term goals and providing statistics such as the ones above on OSU grad employees’ salaries is available here:

• CGE 2010 Bargaining Narrative

Based on the articles they plan to open, it does not appear as though the OSU administration will ask for major givebacks from grad employees this year, which is a relief for the CGE bargaining team. Unfortunately, the OSU administration’s bargaining team did not go so far as to articulate their own vision of how grad employees’ work fits into the university’s long-term plans or of how we should be compensated for our contributions, but that may simply mean they are happy to allow CGE to drive progress for the grad employees we represent. While we will not hesitate to do so, we are always happy when OSU can provide a strong vision of how graduate employees fit into the larger university structure and can put forth contract proposals that make that vision a reality.

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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.