That being said, I, like others, am a little bit frustrated with how fairshare is being implemented. This really revolves around two issues:

1. Transparency of the budget. In response to Noah’s post, you state that it is “obvious” that you can’t post your budget online but that doesn’t seem obvious to me at all. You can easily post a budget at a level that does not reveal specific salary detail. Financial statements should be available easily and quickly online.

2. Representation. If I am now financially supporting the union, I should have a say in what the union does and how it functions. If you are worried about opening the organization to the unwashed masses, you can write a charter that protects fundamental issues (like fairshare) with supermajority votes. But making people pay for the union and not giving them a vote is, to use hyperbole, un-American and autocratic.

Thank you for your service and continued efforts.

CGE does have to pay for more than just fliers and staples, though. All of the CGE officers are grad students who volunteer our time to the union. However, Liz, or office manager, is a half-time employee whose salary we pay, and Dennis, or organizer, is a full time employee whose salary is currently paid in whole through a grant from AFT, or parent union (though, with fair-share in place, Dennis’s salary will be CGE’s responsibility). These two employees do the work that busy grad student volunteers can’t do and are necessary for the union’s function.

CGE must also pay affiliation dues to our parent unions, AFT and AFT-OR. These pay for a number of things, the most important of which are services of Brett, an AFT-OR field representative who serves as our lead negotiator in bargaining with the OSU administration. These affiliation dues also fund other things, such as AFT and AFT-OR’s political-affairs staff who lobby on our behalf (to eliminate student fees, for example) in the national and state legislatures.

Additional expenses CGE must pay include rent for office space, phone and internet bills, etc.

With fair-share in place, CGE will cease to receive grants from our parent unions and will be solely responsible for all of these expenses. Like I said above, if you or anyone else is curious about CGE’s budget, please stop into the office and have a look.

What I still don’t understand is where the money goes. Is the CGE budget online somewhere that we can access? Above people made it sound like the CGE team are volunteers, so if the money is not going to salaries then where is it going? Fliers and staples? Maybe people could swallow this more if they knew exactly where their money was going.

What I think is most important though is, as Jay suggests above, to judge fair-share by the impact it will have in the long term. If you consider together the economic gains that CGE has made over the years through collective bargaining (going from $0 to now $300 per term in fee relief, going from 0% to now 85% health care contribution during the academic year and 50% during the summer, establishing and raising the minimum salary, freezing departmental fees, etc.), the benefit of CGE’s representation becomes obvious. This is also not to mention the many non-economic gains CGE has made through bargaining to improve conditions for grad employees here at OSU. Without CGE’s representation, OSU simply would not treat its grads as well as it now does. If you’ve seen how difficult negotiations are and how hard fought each of these gains is, this will be obvious to you.

Fair-share will provide a way for CGE to fund its future representation of OSU’s grad employees without relying on the tens of thousands of dollars in grants it has received annually from its parent organization and which it could not have relied on much longer. In other words, fair-share will make CGE financially self-sufficient, guaranteeing its ability to negotiate more fee relief, better health care, higher salaries, and better overall conditions of employment for OSU’s grads in the future. I understand that it may be difficult to accept having to pay now for something you didn’t have to pay for before, but in the long run, what you pay now will be returned through the gains CGE makes in future negotiations.