CGE Executive Council Meeting Minutes – January 7, 2014
In attendance: Mindy Crandall, Lizz Hardardt, Béatrice Moissinac, Thomas Morrill, Shannon Andrews, Araby Belcher; Ashley Bromley, Angela McClendon
Meeting called to order at 2 PM (upstairs at Westmin — office is unsuitable for meetings right now)
Email Decisions since 12-5-2013 — (1) Set Winter Term meetings for Tuesdays 2:30 – 4. (2) Approved online tax payment in December. (3) Approved resolution to treat fair share money market account as an escrow account. (4) Approved expense sheet sent to fair share objector. (5) Approved all-member email re: bylaw amendment for dues. (6) Approved Grad Connections blurb. (7) Approved all-member email re: Winter School and fair share edit. (8) Approved non-member email re: fair share edit.
Steward Council Meeting – Tonight! Here at Westmin. Shannon has a food plan and we have an agenda.
Fair Share Issues –
(1) State of things: We have received a formal complaint from one fair share objector. Grad employees have until January 17 to file objections, which would be addressed in a single hearing. At the recommendation of AFT, Ashley has filled out a legal defense fund application. GTFF has recommended an attorney, who claims to handle this sort of case several times each year. Ashley will set up a meeting with the attorney.
(2) Rebates for people who revoke membership: rebate request will go into effect the first of the month following the month they request.
Grad Issue – There’s an international student whose visa depends on her maintaining a certain number of credit hours, but she needs to take some maternity leave. Béatrice suggests she should talk with the people at International Student Services, who know how to take care of the visa issue.
Bargaining Update – The B-Team met in December to get people divided into teams based on the biggest topics from the survey (health insurance, salary, tuition/fees, and appointments/workspace). Our team is trying to arrange with the OSU admin team for training.
Winter School – Kevin, Lizz, Thomas, Béatrice, and Ashley are registered. We have booked one room and also have one AFT-OR room. We’ll run it by the Steward Council tonight to try to get more people interested in going.
Fair Share Money Market Resolution – All officers except Sneha have now signed it.
Social Hour – It seems like every week is too often to have a successful turnout. For winter term, we’ll try doing 5 PM at Bombs Away on dates that end with 5. We think it’s ok that some of those will be Saturdays. Might as well try! (Lauren is willing to host sometimes if they’re a little later; we’ll see if we can schedule a couple of later social hours downtown this term.)
Other Social – The committee is meeting next week to finalize the winter-term calendar. The PhD Movie is screening on Thursday, February 13. Trivia is scheduled for February 11 but we may try to reschedule.
AFT-OR ECxodus – A lot of people have resigned their seats on the AFT-OR EC recently, for a variety of reasons. Also, the chief of staff will be leaving his job on January 17, and they are moving forward on the hiring process for the field rep position.
GMM Childcare – We think a combination of a couple things may work well for us. (1) Have a clearly marked “family area” in the back part of the room, with fun stuff for kids to (hopefully) keep them from running around the people trying to speak. (2) Provide a childcare subsidy in the form of a small amount of money to parents who use a babysitter in order to attend the GMM.
Pay It Forward Letter – AFT-OR asked us to sign a letter (from them and other related organizations) against the proposal. We don’t remember what the letter said, so Ashley will send the email again.
Rideshare on Social List – To avoid the email overload, we would like to look into having a page on our website (or at least a cloud-based spreadsheet) just for rideshare communication. Béatrice has a friend with something similar and she’ll ask if we can use it.
OSU Institutional Board – First meeting is this Thursday and Friday from 8 to 5 – a little too long to ask a CGE volunteer to attend. Mindy will ask Brenda McComb for a more detailed agenda to see if there are specific times that would be beneficial for us to be there.
Budget on Website – We seem to agree that having notes regarding chargeable/nonchargeable categories would be overly complicated and have the potential to look like we’re trying to influence the audit committee. To increase privacy of employees, Mindy would like to combine the staffing expenses into one summary item. We’d like to change “Social Events (Summer and Fall BBQs)” to something like “Welcome and End-Of-Year Outreach BBQs” to make it clearer what we use them for. We could also combine some of the office expense items.
Ed Ray Meeting Action Items – Safety issues, IGERT (maybe?), and e-campus misinformation issues. We’ll ask the Stewards for input from their departments and request input in an all-member email as well. Sometime this month, we should send an all-member safety survey like we told David Blake we would. Also, we want to remind members to USE the Writing Center so the Grad School will have a reason to continue supporting it.
Meeting adjourned at about 3:45 PM