CGE Executive Council Meeting Minutes – July 11, 2012

In attendance: Forrest Parker, Eric Coker, Sydney Householder, Wren Keturi, Danny Ritter, Michelle Marie, Matt Loewen, Bret Seferian, Michelle Zellers, Angela McClendon

Meeting called to order at 3:15 PM

Minutes from 6-20-2012 meeting – not yet approved

[Don’t know whether there are minutes from 7-4-12]

RA Campaign Update – Michelle Z updates us: Maintaining momentum over the summer by having social events (eg, biweekly happy hours – starting today!). Bring your friends! MZ is also working on lit and/or a meeting to talk about bargaining gains and how they’re relevant to RAs and to get ready for an election. [Please correct me on this part. ~AM]

Bargaining Update –

• We are done! TA’d the contract at yesterday’s meeting. We (probably) won’t be able to ratify the contract until fall term has started, but OSU is most likely to go ahead and enact the benefits bargained for. We need to plan a ratification meeting and try to get a lot of people out!
• One important non-economic consequence of this year’s bargaining is that we’ll need to be more thorough and more specific in telling OSU who our authorized representatives are. The OSU team was adamant about CGE only having 15 stewards, but we want to have lots! We’ll have to decide how to make this work.
• Fees: We don’t know yet quite how OSU will handle the change in fee coverages. Some CGE-ers will need to monitor their billings and year-end tax stuff to make sure it looks right.
• Didn’t get anything put into the contract about family/medical leave. So we can’t grieve over anyone being denied this, but we should advocate for people who need it.
• We’re hoping to get a draft contract from OSU to proofread/etc, and then develop some publicizing lit for the membership and orientations.

Alta Gracia – Eric met with them today (included people from IWW, MECHA, Occupy) and it went well. It turns out that Eric went to school with Rachel, the person organizing this. In Oregon, the group “Students Against Sweatshops” is not allowed to operate at universities, so they get around this by working through Alta Gracia, which is a unionized textile shop. The U of O has agreed to purchase some merch from them; OSU hasn’t committed to it yet. The EC is willing to be involved (ie, have Eric be involved) in getting this campaign off the ground.

Ed Ray Meeting – Happened this afternoon. Ray said that he won’t challenge us when the ERB rules in our favor. He also said a bunch of contradictory stuff on what he thinks about RAs. Talked about the lack of anonymity on some evaluations; response: [I didn’t catch this. ~AM]. Also talked about problems with actual work matching FTE; response: talk to grad school, or ombudsperson, or faculty senate.

CGEU Conference – As of 3 PM today, only 3 people submitted letters to go. So now what? We still want to send 8. Wren will re-send the all-member invitation, and specifically target some people (Reps, B-Team).

Budget Discussion – punt

Card for Art – Sydney will get a thank-you card.

Public Information Request – Danny got an email response from Jacque (she’s only kinda sorta retired), who said “OSU will treat your request as one for public records under the Oregon Public Records Law.  The OSU Public Records Officer will be in touch with you shortly about this.” Probably we’ll have to pay for it.

Westminster Orientation – Wren will send a doodle poll for availability so the officers can learn about where stuff is and maybe tidy up some.

ASOSU Grad Affairs – Haven’t hired yet. Task force director has been moved to an hourly position instead of an assistantship – not cool. We’ll follow up on this.

OSU Email Monitoring – During bargaining, we were talking about email policy, and we asked about how they use emails (ie, only in investigations, or sporadically, or continually). We would like to know if OSU has ever not notified students that they’d been accessing emails. We’ve been told their policy is to notify students after the fact – we’d like to verify this, and a public document request could be a good way to find out if they won’t talk to us informally.

Meeting adjourned at 4:15 PM