Coalition of Graduate Employees

On Friday, March 6th (not Monday the 9th) at 1 PM, CGE and GTFF members, among others, will be testifying in front of the Oregon House Education Committee about the effects of fees on the lives of graduate employees.  Anyone who wants to join us is welcome.  Please contact CGE at organizer@cge6069.org or 541-757-7141 if you are interested in participating or have questions.

This is part of our effort to pass HB2508, a bill that would eliminate fees for all graduate employees in the entire Oregon University System.  The full text of HB2508 can be found here.

AFT-OR will also be holding a Lobby Day the morning of Monday, March 9th.  If you are interested in speaking to your state legislators about issues that are important to you, you can find out more and register to participate here or contact us.

Quick update on the $34 Summer Session Tuition Base grievance.  We just found out that the OSU administration deferred to the Oregon Department of Justice to handle the grievance for them in arbitration.  In other words, little old CGE is going to be arguing the case against well trailed lawyers whose job is to know Oregon law.  Doesn’t matter.  It’ll make it that much sweeter to win the thing.

Those of you who are interested in this grievance, start getting fired up.  We’re going to need all the member support we can get for this.  Though we don’t know if it’ll be possible, our goal is to have members be able to attend the arbitration hearing.  I think we might be able to put the DoJ folks off their game a bit if sea of grads show up sporting their (new, black) CGE t-shirts and beanies.

Today, the seven-member Grievance Review Committee met to review the facts surrounding our grievance over the $34 summer session tuition base charge that was levied on our members this summer.  For those unfamiliar with this grievance, more information can be found here.

After hearing our case for the grievance and what we expect to be the OSU administration’s case, the GRC voted unanimously to send the grievance to arbitration, pending the administration’s response at step 3 of our grievance process, for which the deadline is Feb. 2.  CGE has notified the administration of the GRC’s vote, and we have informed them that we are willing to discuss a settlement to this grievance outside of the arbitration process.

If our efforts to settle with the administration fail, however, this will be the first grievance CGE has ever taken to arbitration.  Should that become necessary, we are confident that we will prevail based on the strength of our case.

As you may know, CGE is currently in the midst of a class-action grievance proceedings related to what we believe is a breach of contract by the university. For those unfamiliar with this grievance, this summer, and every summer past, all of our members, regardless of whether or not they were on assistantship, were levied a $34 charge on their student account entitled the “Summer Session Tuition Base.” The name alone would imply that this charge is, in fact, part of tuition, and hence, under Article 12 of the CGE-OSU collective bargaining agreement, should be remitted to all grad employees on assistantship over the summer term.

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Yesterday, CGE and OSU management met for the seventh time. Management promised a comprehensive response to all the issues we’ve raised in bargaining.

• On the key issues of salaries and fee relief, they’ve said “no:” no raises and no increases to the fee relief of $250 per term. Under Management’s current proposal, the only way for someone to get a raise is if the department wants to give a raise. (By the way, fees are going up by at about $60/year to pay for the right to get a football ticket. There are other fees increases as well. Departmental fees will not increase but things like building fees and technology fees could increase.)
• On the issue of email access, they’ve said that we can could start sending email to multiple graduate employees at one time. Clearly they are not in touch with reality. Anyone in the world can send email to multiple graduate employees at one time. Just go to any department’s personnel listing, copy and paste a few email addresses, type a message and press send. Presto! You’ve just violated the university’s email policy, and they won’t do anything about it, because this happens all the time.
• The bit of good news is that we might get summer health insurance, if the details can be worked out. This is certainly something that we are interested in and we are pleased that Management has brought this to the table. The CGE bargaining team is prepared to work very hard to get this in place for this summer. We’ll see what the administration is willing to do.
• The university is not willing to increase its contribution for health care beyond 75% of the single payer deductible.
• The university is not willing to increase its family friendliness. They are not willing to to contribute towards health insurance for spouses or dependents. Further, the university is not prepared to offer graduate employees specific money for childcare that is separate from what is already available.
• The university is not willing to grant us fair-share.
• On a variety of issues regarding the interaction between CGE and university, the university has made some movement.

Overall, the CGE bargaining team and the CGE members present were very displeased with proposal. Progress on summer health insurance is good. However, no increases in fee relief and no guaranteed raises are unacceptable because it does not guarantee graduate employees’ ability to keep up with inflation. It is distressing to see that OSU Management would not propose anything to make OSU more family friendly, via contributions to spouse and dependent health insurance and child. Not granting fair-share is unacceptable because it will keep the union weak. Fair share is something that OSU is not philosophically opposed to, as they collect fees set by student government. Second, of all the groups affiliated with campus, CGE is one of the largest (at nearly 360 members) and it is what our members want. Third, every other higher education related union in the state has fair-share, including OSU’s Service Employees International Union, the union for classified employees on campus. In other words, neither OUS nor OSU are opposed to unions having fair-share.

It sounds like the administration wants to make this a long summer.