In attendance: Béatrice Moissinac, Thomas Morrill, Drew Hatlen, Shannon Andrews, Alisha Jones, Gloria Ambrowiak; Angela McClendon, Ashley Bromley
Meeting called to order at 6:00 PM
Minutes from 12-10-2014 Meeting – Approved
Email Decisions – (1) Approved purchase of new checks. (2) Approved Ashley using some of her professional development funds for Winter School. (3) Approved all-member email about Winter School and GTFF strike. (4) Approved moving the Steward Council meeting to Tuesday, January 13 (from Monday). (5) Approved purchase of new modem.
Online Tax Payment – The EC approves paying December’s federal payroll taxes online.
Audit & Fair Share Update – We seem to still be moving along. Angela has been sending the CPA team all the documents they request. Yesterday, we received an email from last year’s fair share challenger. Shannon will draft a response to him for the EC to look over.
OSU HR Meeting Debrief – Yesterday morning, Thomas, Ashley, and a grad employee who works as a lab instructor met with Dave Blake and Viki Dimick to talk about (1) the lab safety issue and (2) some bargaining unit classification issues. (1) They seemed shocked and interested in improving the lab safety situation. (2) They seemed willing to work on it and receptive to the idea of some of these people being in the BU. We’ll probably need to push them at each step to keep working on it. (3) Thomas also brought up an issue we heard about regarding an unpaid e-campus TA position. Dave & Viki acknowledged that it’s “unusual” and “probably shouldn’t” be happening; they said they’ll look into it. (4) Ashley mentions that as soon as the CGE group arrived, Dave and Viki were very eager to tell us about how glad they are we have a positive relationship.
Social Hour Debrief – Gloria hosted this on Monday the 5th. It was sparsely attended, but admittedly it was on rather short notice. We’ll have another social hour next Thursday, the 15th. We have an EC meeting scheduled that evening at 6, so we’ll ask a couple stewards to anchor the second half.
HIAC Meeting Debrief – Sean, Spencer, Sara, and Ashley met Tuesday to talk about the summer insurance triple-deduction problem. They came up with a couple ideas for how to manage the premium payment schedule differently in future years (like having the payments divided over 3 or 9 months).
Strike Committee Meeting Debrief – André, Clint, Béatrice, Kris, and Ashley met yesterday to talk about what we’d like to have in a strike procedure document. The goal is to have a proposal ready for the Spring GMM amending CGE’s constitution language to include a minimum quorum for a strike authorization vote. The committee will also prepare policy and procedure documents to be ready (ideally) by June (and no later than before we start the next round of bargaining).
Officer Emails – Spam is a serious problem in the cge6069.org email accounts. We get so much that it discourages some people from checking their emails regularly. Ashley proposes creating some CGE gmail accounts to use for officer emails, because gmail has good spam filtering. We can forward CGE emails to the gmail, but the gmail accounts will remain in CGE’s control so the correspondence history won’t be lost when officers move on. Shannon and Thomas are satisfied enough with their current setup, but the officers would really like this. We will get these gmail accounts created for all seven officer addresses so people can use them when they want to.
GMM – This will be Thursday, January 29th. (1) Food: Let’s make curries! With a big pot of rice and some salad. Gloria would appreciate guidance on recipes. (2) Agenda: Update on the GTFF strike as a lead-in to discussion of our proposed amendment proposal. Update on the family caucus (which will have a lunch meeting on Wednesday the 21st). There are some groups who requested time to speak; we’ll give a couple minutes to OSU Divest; we’ll invite the Health Care for All rally people to share their information in the open floor time. (3) Elections: For Convention delegates, we will open nominations right after the SC meeting through a google form. Online nominations will close Tuesday the 27th. Additional nominations will be accepted from the floor at the GMM. We’ll pre-print ballots with all advance nominations and some blank lines for write-ins. We’ll count votes after the GMM. (4) Turnout plan: Election notice snail-mailed to all members by Wednesday the 14th; all-member email on the 14th; fbook event posted on the 14th; all-member reminder email on Monday the 26th; individual emails on Wednesday the 28th.
Steward Council – First meeting this term is next Tuesday, the 13th. The food plan is soups with salad and bread. Agenda includes intros, steward awards, dept updates, Convention, office visits, strike update, fellows issues, family caucus call, and HIAC update. Turnout plan: Béatrice already emailed the rep list and will also send reminders.
Family Caucus – As alluded to above, Béatrice and Ashley are setting up a lunch meeting for Wednesday the 21st. The EC approves food spending up to $10 per expected attendee (they’ll request RSVPs).
Office Visits – Béatrice and Ashley have been talking about how best to structure office visits for this term. We want to have participation from more (all?!) stewards, but it seemed like the 2-hour shifts were keeping some from signing up. This time we’ll try 1-hour shifts and giving people to option to request preferred areas to visit.
Winter Term Social Calendar – Ashley has printed this up! We’ve made a couple little updates in moving the January SC meeting and game night.
Higher Ed Conference/AGEL – We’d like to send some people. The deadline for registration is February 6th; we’ll ask for submissions by Monday the 2nd so officers can review them by the EC meeting on the 3rd.
Ed Ray Meeting – Alisha is working to set up a meeting. It would be good to follow up on the non-BU work assignments and the October 1 start date issue. Maybe some idea from the family caucus will be ready to share.
AFT-Oregon Scholarships and Awards – The deadline for applying for these is January 31st. Shannon will send an all-member email announcement tomorrow so members have lots of time to submit applications for the scholarships. The EC is interested in nominating Hailey Buckingham for the John Connor Memorial Award for “selfless, spirited enthusiasm and devotion to causes of the union, which serves as an inspiration to fellow union activists.”
Meeting ended at 7:55 PM