We met with the OSU Admin team on Friday, May 13^th to continue bargaining. The Admin team owed us quite a bit of contract language, and they delivered.

On Article 8 Union Rights, the Admin Team pretty much rejected all of our substantive changes, including:

• Refusing to acknowledge the full complement of CGE stewards by capping the number at 30 (whereas we had proposed a more accurate 50)
• Refusing a Graduate Employee voting position on the University Budget Committee
• Rejecting the proposal that if OSU fails to deduct dues for more than one month, the liability for paying dues should lie with OSU, not with the employee. Instead, they will be improving the process to prevent this situation and will work with the employee to spread any back deductions out.

On Article 9 Appointments, the OSU Admin team brought us language that:

• Does normalize year-long appointments and make term-to-term appointments exceptions only. There’s still a little wordsmithing to do on this issue, but we feel close.

On Article 10 Work Assignment, the OSU Admin team brought us language that:

• Does recognize a department’s responsibility to provide for private student meeting space
• Removed particular examples of what would constitute appropriate workspace
• Guaranteed that Grad Employee office space would have the same custodial and other services as other similar spaces

On Article 11 Salary, the OSU Admin Team brought us language that:

• Would have SEVIS and Visa fee remission paid out centrally as a reimbursement
• Would otherwise not change their previous salary offer:
  • No guaranteed candidacy raises
  • No increase to the 2% COLA
  • Minimum FTE would increase to 0.3 in 2017

On Article 28 Health Insurance, the OSU Admin Team brought us language that basically reflected their existing proposals in that it would:

• Not increase OSU’s health insurance premium contribution
• Require everyone to re-enroll for summer insurance, even under a system that is otherwise auto-enroll
• Require employees to re-enroll their families each year
• Not address the need for gap term health insurance coverage

We were able to reach our first tentative agreement of this round of negotiations on Article 22 Parking. The two teams have agreed that Graduate Employees will be allowed to charge their parking permit as a payroll deduction spread over Fall Term paychecks.

CGE will counter-propose on Articles 8, 9, 10, and 28 on Friday, May 20^th. Check out the blog post on Session 16 to see our counter-proposal on Article 11.