In attendance: Kris Osterloh, Stephanie Parreira, Chris Mihiar, Thomas Morrill, Clint Mattox, Zhian Kamvar, Vance Almquist; Ashley Bromley, Angela McClendon
Meeting called to order at 5:30 PM
Minutes from 10-8-2015 – Approved.
Email Decisions – Approved all-member email for bargaining survey reminder.
Brew-Off Design – The awesome, really talented artist who has been creating our Brew-Off designs and shirts for the last few years brought us a design this year that discomforts some people, because it might be an inappropriate use of imagery from Mexican culture. This imagery has already been printed on our pint glasses and stickers. We don’t have the t-shirts printed yet, but we do feel an obligation to our event sponsors to have some kind of Brew-Off shirt with their names on the back. The EC agrees that we should talk with OSU’s chapter of MEChA, a national organization working toward self-determination for Chicanos and awareness of Chicano issues, culture, and history. We want to tell them that we realize our planning committee approved the design without considering whether it might be inappropriate or offensive; we see now that it could be hurtful; we don’t want to use the design unless we ask to work with them and receive their approval. The EC requests that Ashley reach out to MEChA; she will contact Nicthé tomorrow. We will continue the discussion of what to do with the merchandise after Ashley has a conversation with MEChA.
General Membership Meeting – This is on Tuesday, October 27.
- Agenda: Ratification of the new paid sick leave contract (first, because it needs its own meeting). Present and vote on bargaining platform. Quick updates on membership numbers and treasurer report. Update on the Friedrichs Supreme Court case about public sector fair share. Announcements for AGEL and Brew-Off. We’ll have small group conversations about paid sick leave, bargaining platform, or Friedrichs. We’re also planning to have Brew-Off ticket pre-sales available before and after business.
- Menu: We’ll do Yumm Bowls! Because they’re tasty.
- Turnout: We’re planning to send an all-member email on Tuesday the 20th. Ashley will create the fb event. We’ll figure out the rest at next week’s meeting.
Steward Council Meeting Date – The November SC meeting is currently scheduled for Tuesday, November 10. There’s another group that has (somehow) also booked the room. Ashley will switch our SC meeting to Thursday the 12th. This means the EC meeting that week will remain on Tuesday the 10th.
Fair Share Notice – Ashley has drafted a fair share notice that we’ll send to new non-members with all the information a new employee needs about fair share. The EC has a couple wording edits and approves Ashley sending it as updated. We will send to non-members from the list we currently have, although it is incomplete, in order to be timely; we’ll send it again (to new folks we don’t know about yet) in a couple weeks when we have the more complete list. (In December, we’ll send a notice of the rate change for 2016 to all non-members. There will be one email for new folks that’s just rate change, and one email for returning folks that’s rate change plus notice to renew objection.) Ashley also made a form to collect all the info we’d need from people who request the refunds, so they don’t have to compose their own letters.
Online Membership Form – Ashley has created an online membership form through Knack. We all tried it out and it looks cool. The EC approves Ashley putting the link to the form on the website where we currently have a PDF version of the blue card.
AGEL Update – At last week’s AGEL call, we learned that the staff training won’t actually happen this year. This means Ashley will have a smidge less work to do! Yesterday, Ashley & Chris were on a call with the conference planning group to finalize workshops. Ashley is disappointed that our fun organizer training ideas all got kinda smushed into what will probably be a standard AFT organizer training. The other workshops all have titles and many topics and the planning group is working on connecting workshop leaders. (Any officer who isn’t leading a workshop should plan on attending them!)
HR Email Fiasco – Yesterday morning, OSU HR sent an email to (apparently) all grad assistants informing them with an old letter whether or not they’re in the CGE bargaining unit. This information was from before our RA campaign and so it was not true. OSU sent a follow-up email a few hours later:
Please disregard the email sent to you and other graduate students today entitled, “Important Information Regarding Your Graduate Assistantship.” The email was not intentionally sent, but generated and sent as an error. Please note that the information contained in the email is not accurate. The Office of Human Resources apologizes for any inconvenience due to the system generated email.
We were generally disappointed in their incompetence and/or intransigence (the age-old question). Thomas & Ashley will bring it up in their next meeting with Dave & Viki (which is Monday the 26th), and use it as a lead-in to asking why OSU still categorizes GA’s as in-service or not, even though they do finally recognize all GA’s are in the BU.
Accountability Preview – We often feel overwhelmed at the end of a term when we have our check-in and realize all the things we meant to get done. So tonight we looked at and had some discussion about all the strategic goals for October. Some of them are already in the works for October; many of them we will push to November when we have any time at all. There are a few specific things: Stephanie would like to update department bulletin boards; Ashley will get location info and documents to her. Stephanie & Clint will plan a health insurance informational event for late in the term. Stephanie will also draft a very brief “What is CGE?” survey for us to take to the MU Quad sometime in November. Clint will ask next week for a meeting with Ed Ray; officers should think over the next few days about when would work best for the meeting (obviously not October!).
Meeting adjourned at 7:30 PM