In attendance: Thomas Morrill, Clint Mattox, Kris Osterloh, Chris Mihiar, Stephanie Parreira, Vance Almquist, Zhian Kamvar; Ashley Bromley, Angela McClendon; special guest Drew Hatlen

Meeting called to order at 5:37 PM

Minutes from 12-08-2015 – Approved.

Email Decisions – (1) Approved Social List email about Oregon’s tax credit for political and cultural contributions. (2) Approved all-member email about two paid sick leave training sessions. (3) Approved SC list email about AFT-OR Winter School. (4) Approved Option 1 for our Convention house.

PhD Movies 1 & 2 – Drew is here to talk about CGE & the Grad School collaborating on screening the two PhD Comics movies. They’ll be shown on January 7th in LINC 128, after a winter-term new grad orientation. The first movie will start at 7 PM and the new one will start around 8:45. The EC agrees that it’s still a good use of our funds to contribute $400 toward the screening expenses with the stipulation that the CGE name/logo/sponsorship be added prominently to all the promo materials. CGE will bring our popcorn maker and popcorn. Vance and Stephanie will plan to run the CGE “Ask a grad!” table. Drew will look into getting tables provided. We’ll email the steward list to ask for a couple folks to meet the new grads from the orientation (there will probably be around 6-8 people), hang out with them at Bombs Away, and then go with them to the movie.

Leave Donation Plan – We’ve just received notice of the first request for a donation of paid sick leave (although it has not yet been approved). However, we haven’t put out any requests for people to donate, so there’s no pool to draw from yet. We need to decide whether to publish the donation forms this week, so the pool gets started, or to wait until winter term when people will be here/paying attention to emails. The EC agrees that we will wait until the start of winter term. Our first priority, though, is to identify people who will be graduating very soon to ask them to donate their leave that will be disappearing very soon, and to identify people who pledge to donate some portion of their leave when a request arises. [Vance notes that it would be really useful to have a checkbox for this in the office visit database. Ashley agrees and is also thinking about sending out paper forms with office visitors.]

Social List Code of Conduct – Zhian has drafted, emailed, and amended a Social List Code of Conduct. The EC likes it. Zhian will send it to the Steward Council for approval at their January 12 meeting. Upon approval, we’ll send it across the list; we’ll also post it on our website.

Field Safety Meetings Debrief – Kris met last Thursday with someone from OSU EHS (Environmental Health & Safety) and CGE stewards Esteban and Laura. They talked about some of the issues we have identified – in particular, a university-wide resource for fieldwork supplies such as radios and beacons. CGE’s current delegate to the University Health & Safety Committee (Stephany) is mostly working out of town now. Kris is going to attend the UHSC meeting tomorrow; he will also ask Esteban if he’s willing to step in as our delegate.

Convention House – Ashley emailed about two good house options in Lincoln City. The EC agreed that Option 1 is the better choice. The cost is less than last year’s hotel rooms (about $1800 vs $2400). There will be about a mile to walk, on a busyish road with no sidewalks, between the CGE house and the GTFF house where we’ll be socializing Friday night; we note that officers should be conscientious about looking out for their fellow delegates. Ashley will book our reservation!

Ed Ray Meeting – We’ll be meeting with Ed Ray and some other admins this Thursday at 1 PM.

• Assign agenda items: Kris will talk about safety issues. Stephanie will research campus earthquake preparedness issues (she’ll check the EHS report). Vance will talk about people being paid hourly for bargaining unit work (he’ll meet with Ashley & Thomas tomorrow to learn about it). Zhian will talk about the cost of sick leave donation (he’ll meet with Ashley tomorrow).
• Email agenda around: Kris will email this out to the list of people Ashley will provide him.
• EHS safety report: Stephanie will review this report and Kris will attach it to the agenda email.

Grad School Intro Meeting – Kris will re-email these folks in the first week of January and also stop by their offices if he still doesn’t get any responses.

AFT-OR Convention Delegate Notice – Ashley has updated our notice from last year. The EC approves it. Once we get our delegate allocation from AFT-OR, we’ll plug the number in, print, fold, and mail!

Calling vs Emailing Stewards – Stephanie expresses that emailing the Steward list hasn’t been a very effective way of getting them to turn people out for events. She feels like emails are easy to ignore because they feel impersonal and wonders if we could use phone calls instead. (Ashley notes that sending texts has sometimes been the only way to get EC members to do things.) The EC agrees that we should ask the Steward Council at the next meeting for their feedback and about calling/texting.

Fidelity Bond Renewal – The EC approves renewing our annual fidelity insurance bond at the same coverage amount as last year ($95 payment for $100,000 coverage).

Freedom Foundation – Kris got a call from Janella from AFT-OR yesterday. She wanted to let us know about a group called the “Evergreen Freedom Foundation” (associated with the national “Freedom Foundation” and “Right to Work” groups and with sponsorship from the Koch brothers) that has begun harassing public employee unions in Oregon. Among other things, they started a lawsuit this summer against SEIU 503 on behalf of a home healthcare worker who doesn’t want to pay fair share, and they’re now leafletting and distributing “opt out” forms around some AFT-represented Oregon campuses. We recognize that we need to do some work to educate and “inoculate” our members against this anti-union rhetoric that will be showing up on ballots and on campus soon.

Accountability Check-In –

• External Relations: Clint will attend the LBL-CLC meeting tomorrow. He participated in the AGEL call last week. He is also working with some other AGEListas to improve AFT’s membership involvement for political endorsements.
• Organizing: We’re going to work on organizing plans with our organizing committee and Julia from AFT-OR next term. We’ve drafted the delegate election notice. We still want to reach out to non-members on the Social List to ask if they want to be members.
• Communications: We’ll plan to run the CGE survey in the 2nd week of January: tentatively 12-1 on 1/12, 10-11 on 1/13, and 3-4 on 1/14. We want to get an article in the Barometer and Advocate; Stephanie will write something about the first bargaining session. Stephanie hasn’t had success finding a class for an undergrad lecture. We’re thinking about making videos instead, perhaps in multiple languages (Ashley suggests people would be more likely to watch something conversational like we had for the RA Campaign than a lecture format). Ashley will plan to update bulletin boards next term when we have new schedules. We’ll plan to distribute bargaining session calendars (when they’re scheduled!) into all the grad employee mailboxes next term.
• Social: Zhian has written the Social List Code of Conduct and will ask for SC approval in January.
• Bargaining: Thomas and Vance will talk together about bargaining turnout incentives and improving language we use to turn people out to bargaining sessions. We’ve wanted to improve format consistency in the bargaining blog; B-Team member Dixie has volunteered to write all the blog posts. We haven’t had any bargaining sessions yet, but we look forward to reaching 100 unique observers once those start!
• Financial: The IRS Form 990 has been submitted. It’s nearly 8 PM already so we’re going to review the budget when we get back in January.
• AFT-OR: We still need to convene our Convention Committee and then we’ll work on drafting some amendments and resolutions.
• Upkeep: We’re working on the Affirmative Action Policy (waiting on scheduling with someone from OSU’s Office of Equity and Inclusion for some guidance). And now we’ve done our fall term accountability check-in!

Meeting adjourned at 7:45 PM