CGE Executive Council Meeting Minutes – January 14, 2014
In attendance: Mindy Crandall, Lizz Hardardt, Sneha Gantla, Béatrice Moissinac, Thomas Morrill, Shannon Andrews; Ashley Bromley, Angela McClendon; millions of letters to be folded
Meeting called to order at 2:35 PM (upstairs at Westm – office is unsuitable for meetings right now – but it’s been painted today, so we’re about ready to put everything back!)
Email Decisions — (1) Approved online payroll tax payment. (2) Approved Convention delegate election notice. (3) Approved Julia Trist coming for office visits. (4) Approved extra Winter School participants.
Minutes from 12-5-13 and 1-7-14 Meetings – Approved
Steward Council Meeting Recap – This was the evening of Tuesday the 7th. The three main topics (dues restructure, fairshare challenges, upcoming “right to work” ballot initiative) all created a lot of good conversation. Bonus: we cooked exactly the right amount of food and it was inexpensive too! Upcoming email to SC: get together with grads from your department and CGE can buy a pizza.
GTFF GMM Recap – Béatrice and Sneha went to this last Friday. Their presence was definitely appreciated. GTFF is bargaining right now. Members were unhappy that the UO admin team has told them their stipend is not meant to be a “living wage” (we’ve heard similar here as well). Takeaways for CGE GMMs: use the projector to show stuff we’re talking about; have awards and/or small raffles regularly. (Possible awards: B-Team longevity, something for Stewards.)
Meeting with Lawyer – Mindy, Ashley, Angela, Lizz, and Sneha are leaving CGE tomorrow at 1:30 PM.
Budget for Website – We’ll finalize this next week.
Ed Ray Meeting Action Items – Safety Survey: we want it to be very open-ended with space for people to report multiple issues. Also need to make it clear that we need very specific locations for issues so OSU can actually go fix them. We can send a link to the survey (which Ashley can draft by Friday) in an all-member email, and then ask Stewards to send it to grads in their departments. Also, Sneha will begin scheduling our Winter Term meeting. Writing Center: We’ll include a note in an all-member email that grads have this available now and it needs to be used in order to keep it!
GMM – Childcare Subsidy: It turns out that the GTFF hasn’t really used this before, so they don’t have a policy we can copy. We’d prefer to have a policy in place. (1) How to get it? Parents need to request it by the close of business the day before the GMM (this time, that’s by Wednesday the 29th). We’ll give them a check at the end of the GMM. (2) Maximum amount? We’ll go with $30 this time and ask for input. We’ll include a notice of this option in an all-member email. Key Agenda Items: Convention delegate elections, dues restructure proposal, bargaining platform approval.
AFT-OR Convention – We get 21 delegates this year! Our own Convention committee met last week regarding resolutions: (no percaps reform this year), moving AFT-OR money to a credit union, fighting to keep driver license provisions for undocumented workers in Oregon, and a general statement in favor of progressive immigration reform at the state and national levels. The committee would like to have resolutions finalized for approval at the February Steward Council meeting.
Social Hours – First one is tomorrow! Béatrice will host it. (Shannon will fbook it, and will email the hosting schedule to the EC.)
OSU Institutional Board’s First Meeting – Ashley attended this for a few hours on Thursday. She was the only non-board member there. They accomplished a lot in a short time! Electing chairs, setting up committees and appointing members, and drafting and approving their bylaws. The student representative (Taylor) did a good job participating in the meeting and has encouraged students to attend future meetings to keep the board accountable. We’ll reinitiate contact with him and hope he’ll send us future agendas.
“Pay It Forward” Letter – Punted to next week.
Story Time – Sneha read us some of her new book, “A Is for Activist.” It’s great. We’ll try to read the rest of it together soon.
Meeting adjourned around 4-ish?