In attendance: Thomas Morrill, Alisha Jones, Drew Hatlen, Kris Osterloh, Shannon Andrews, Gloria Ambrowiak, Béatrice Moissinac; guest member Chris Brueck (a steward for CBEE); Ashley Bromley, Angela McClendon, Rodolfo Palma
Meeting called to order at 6:05 PM
Minutes from 1-15-2014 Meeting – Approved
Email Decisions – None this week.
Audit Update – Today we received the draft fair share statement. We expect to receive the whole audit report with reviewed/finalized statement this week. This year, we will use the “old” (2013-14) rate for October-December, and the new rate for January-December. Ashley will send around a draft with language saying that. We intend to send the notice out this week. Shannon and Ashley will draft a response to the complainant that will be sent at the same time as the notice that goes to all nonmembers.
Game Night – Everything is on track for this Thursday at 6 PM at the Senior Center. CGE will provide delicious popcorn.
GMM – This is next Thursday, the 29th. Food Plan: We’re going to make curries! Gloria & Shannon have teaching obligations from 1-4 on Thursday. They will shop on Tuesday (the 27th); Gloria & Ashley will collaborate on the shopping list. Most of the prep will happen Wednesday (G, S, and Kris) and we’ll do crockpotting on Thursday. Thomas can help manage foods Thursday afternoon. Breakout Conversations: We’re going to try putting these at the beginning of the meeting in hopes of keeping attendance up. We’ll deliberately arrange for each table to have a “captain” who knows about CGE stuff (ie, an officer or longtime member). Other Speakers: A couple weeks ago we agreed to give OSU Divest time on the agenda and inviting the “Health Care for All” rally speaker to talk in the open floor time. We’ve decided to have them at the bottom of the agenda, right before/starting open floor.
ASAP – There’s a recently formed OSU student group (“Allied Students for Another Politics”) whose organizer, Sam, is an undergrad who went with CGE folks to the GTFF strike. She emailed us last week to ask about getting our groups working together on student and academic-employee issues. Ashley will invite her to attend the GMM and see how our group works.
Reps List – We’d like to encourage more discussions across the reps list, to keep the SC more involved and (hopefully) reduce the time spent at SC meetings in basic background/introduction to topics. Ashley and Braden (as VPs for Organizing) used to send a “fun” version of EC minutes to the SC. Maybe Kris or Béatrice will restart that.
Tuition Remission Issues/Questions – There has been some miscommunication in CEOAS about tuition waivers for GTA/GRAs: one of the college administrators said in an email to everyone that appointments less than 0.4 FTE would no longer be eligible for tuition waivers. This is (1) a direct violation of our CBA; (2) very worrisome to the grads there; and (3) probably a misinterpretation of the info that actually came to CEOAS from “OSU Central.” We’ll set up a meeting with Sherm and also send an all-member email requesting input on what people have heard in their areas. Ashley mentioned that she had a pretty significant discussion about this with several members in CEOAS during office visits today; we’ll be sure to ask about it in later office visits, at least in departments where we expect it to come up, based on typical grad appointments. (This reminds us that we still have a goal of having regular meetings with college/department heads. We’ll talk about this more next week.)
Ed Ray Meeting – This has gotten switched around a few times. Alisha will send an email that we prefer 11 AM on Thursday (Feb 5th) but could make 10 AM that day work.
Drew’s Conflict of Interest Disclosure – Because of CGE’s policy, Drew has written a disclosure letter about potential conflicts of interest since he is an officer of CGE and working for the Grad School. He has submitted it to the other officers now. The other officers agree that Drew should continue in his officer role without restrictions other than recusing himself from decisions that are identified as conflicts of interest, or those restrictions relevant to all officers of not distributing confidential information (eg, potential grievances or bargaining strategies).
CGE Facebook Events – Basically, the FB is weird. All 7 officers plus Ashley and Angela are admins on the CGE Group, and thus can create events for the group. However, not all of us can “Invite the whole group” rather than “Invite my friends in the group” (and to further complicate it, some of us can occasionally “invite all” but not always). We spend some time around the computers and determine that this is a weird FB thing, not an issue in how we were setting up events. Going forward, if one of us cannot “invite all” to an event they’re creating, they’ll ask one of the others who can to create it.
Meeting ended at 8:05 PM