Keep in mind that because our stipends are so laughably shoddy (more than 50% behind competitor universities in the case of most GTFs outside the hard sciences), that the university uses the collectively bargained and member-run health care trust as a recruitment tool. Apparently they've decided that the best way to lure the best and brightest grads to the the university is to neither pay them a living wage nor compensate for this lack of fair and adequate compensation with a decent health care plan.
So now we wait to be told how we don't deserve to be paid a fair wage, as well as how taking the running of our health care plan out of our hands and placing it in the university's hands.
In reality, this is a direct, duplicitous and craven attack on our ability to organize and recruit, as the university is well aware that we use the health care as a recruitment tool of our own. See you when the talking starts.
Sine labore nihil.
3:23 p.m. Our bargaining team is here. 2/5 of the university team in the room.
3:30 p.m. GTFs slowly filing in, a couple of faculty union members have shown up, as well. Still waiting on one member of the university team.
3:32 p.m. Fancy Lawyer opening with economic proposals. No, wait, he wants to talk about the CBA-gutting discipline and discharge changes.
More vague language "certain serious types of offenses." At the university's discretion to create a taxonomy of offense, of course.
We don't understand how the current provisos don't already allow UO the leeway they seem to want. Fancy Lawyer claims they are "clarificatory"changes. Now he admits it is indeed implicit in the article as currently written.
3:35 p.m. Article 18, governing summer term, mostly clarifying language. They want summer session tuition waivers limited to courses "in furtherance of the degree." Once again, it's unclear who gets to judge which courses count. They want to "tighten the requirements" to get a summer tuition waiver, to no longer include GTFs who have not worked less than two quarters in the previous year and at least one in the following fall. We don't understand why this requirement needs to be tightened. They "aren't aware that there have been abuses, but there is the potential for abuses."
This "won't have much impact." Clearly a lawyer who makes his money busting unions and defending tobacco companies is in a position to make such a claim.
There it is: they want to be able to "collect" summer tuition from GTFs who do not/cannot enroll the following fall term. So, say you have a accident or get pregnant or have a family emergency and have to take leave, the university says:
We've asked for no fees, the university responds by proposing to raise our fees. We want more dollars than they have to spend on us, says Fancy Lawyer. Maybe he could give us some of his 500,000 dollars.
We have packed this room with grad unionists. A few faculty unionists among us.
The university wants clear contractual language that prevents supervisors from advising students not to enroll in summer courses. Ah, but supervisors can "inform" GTF that their funding will be negatively affected by their enrolling in summer courses. Fancy Lawyer says this isn't coercion, it's "providing them with accurate financial information." Someone needs to inform him of the distinction between occurrent and dispositional coercion. "Awful nice grant you've got there, GTF. Be a damn shame if something happened to it..."
3:49 p.m. Clarifying changes to Forced Reduction. Fancy Lawyer can't distinguish between a fee waiver--which he just refused to grant--and a tuition waiver. A person who actually works at the university fixes it for him. Basically, the university is reducing the number of terms waived. Under the current CBA, if a course is canceled, the GTF gets the tuition waiver for the term in which the course was canceled, as well as for the following term, regardless whether the course is canceled. The university does not want to guarantee the waiver that following term, unless the GTF is teaching. So we proposed, and the university moves backward. Fancy Lawyer just can't understand why the university should bear more responsibility for fluctuating enrollment than the GTF. Because we clearly tell people not to enroll in our classes and wish for them to be canceled so we can go frolic in the gumdrop forest with the bubblegum faeries.
3:58 p.m. They want to make fees a percentage of our compensation package (which they still claim, risibly, to include their ever-skyrocketing tuition). So members making more money, pay more fees. This university loves nothing more than to rely on fees to support their tottering financial structure.
4:00 p.m. They don't want to pay our premiums at the current rate (95%) if premiums are raised more than 10%. The university claims they were raised 22% last year. It's a "very costly" benefit, says Fancy Lawyer.
"Costly:" Kind of like paying a lawyer that doesn't know we're an AFT local half a million dollars to embarrass himself.
Our organizer asks where their figures came from. Fancy Lawyer does not know. Apparently the university did not properly plan and had to dip into the $51M surplus. No, on second thought, they admit that they did not have to do so.
4:03 p.m. Here comes the health care proposal...Fancy Lawyer: "If the university can find the same health care at a lower cost, we get to switch." They are "exploring a self-payment plan." But this is all just subterfuge. The university already has this ability. They just have to run it through the Trust and collectively bargain the new plan. So they're not asking for anything they don't have; they're going after the GTFF Health and Welfare Trust. They say it's only potentially in their plans. But I think we can all see through the bullsh*t here: they want us to agree to language that would allow them to undemocratically eliminate the Trust. If there is one thing that will get every GTF on this campus to walk right out into the street, it is this issue. They don't understand why if they can give us the same benefits through different means, why we care about the means.
Right now, we run our health care. They want to run it. Basically, they want us to hand control of our health care to a group of people who I wouldn't put in charge of building a birdhouse. With pre-cut pieces. And glue.
They don't know if it would be a HMO or a PPO. They don't want to geographically restrict our coverage. Our organizer astutely points out that they are trying to circumvent both the Trust and the collective bargaining process by inserting language that would allow the university the change our coverage, at will, without consulting either with the Trust and/or without bargaining that change in plan.
Bottom line: They want to be able to eliminate the Trust and change our plan outside of the collective bargaining process, and Fancy Lawyer man does not deny this when asked directly if such was the case.
4:15 p.m. If a GTF has to go to through immigration procedures that last longer than a week, the university wants to reduce their FTE. The university doesn't seem to have any sort of plan for the GTF to make up that lost time, however.
4:18 p.m. They are rejecting our proposal that a GTF be paid an extra fraction to cover for a sick GTF, as well as our proposal that a GTF be paid paternity leave.
We are asking if the university understood the GTF who spoke last week, because they have no response to our proposal beyond saying "no." Their new answer: "Finances." We ask what that means. Once again, we're asking for too many dollars. I wonder how one person asking for 500,000 dollars is not asking too much, but 1400 people, almost half of whom are paid below the poverty line, asking for 6 weeks paid leave, is asking for too much.
A photographic summation of the university's response to our economic proposals:
We're asking if they did demographic surveys to back up their data. They did not. So...no empirical basis for the $250K figure. This is what half a mil pays for nowadays. Hard to find good help, I guess.
4:32 p.m. Fancy Lawyer bemoaning the "precipitous" drop in state funding. Anticipated punchline: GTFs are just going to have the bear the burden of this. Fancy Lawyers are apparently recession-proofed. We ask about the endowment and the general fund. Fancy Lawyer has no answers, but he gets backed up by the Head of University Finance. Who refuses to talk about the university finances. One might wonder just what this lawyer was brought here for, such is the dearth of his knowledge.
Fancy Lawyer continues intoning about how the university governance is changing, and says they expect tuition to continue to rise 5%/yr. They feel like like they are capped on out of state tuition, and that if they increase it further, out of state enrollment will drop.
Heaven forfend.
Now they're blaming the faculty union and the classified staff collectively-bargained raises for not being able to give us raises. Our organizer asks for the percentages. Fancy Lawyer does not have the numbers. Our organizer kindly provides him with these numbers, which she has directly in front of her. The Head of University Finance can't decide if "at least" means a cap or a floor. Smashing stuff, this.
I think the administration needs a math GTF on call.
They now admit they gave across-the-board raises to the faculty and classified staff unions, and somehow they believe this has no bearing on whether they should give us a raise.
4:48 p.m. Apparently, we have the ability to control the raises to our premiums. This is news to us. They are now summarily rejecting our proposals on raises to dental and vision coverage, again they say we're asking for too many dollars, but they admit they have no estimated figures of the cost of the changes. So they don't know how much it costs, they just know it costs too much.
They have literally done no homework since our last session. They have no estimated costs for anything but paternal leave, but they have nevertheless rejected each of our economic proposals as too costly.
Now we're being fed this f**king sophistry about how the tuition waiver is part of our pay, so raises in tuition are de facto raises to us. Remind me never to hire this guy to to be my lawyer.
Our organizer points out that we generate revenue in the form of bringing in students via the classes we teach. We ask for the tuition brought in by classes taught by GTFs. Fancy Lawyer doesn't know. We tell him it's roughly 1/3 of total tuition revenue
THEY ARE NOW CLAIMING NOT TO BE AWARE OF THEIR TOTAL TUITION REVENUE. "THEY" ARE THE HEAVILY COMPENSATED LAWYER AND THE HEAD OF UNIVERSITY FINANCE.
This is tantamount to my students showing up to my class and me informing them that I have no idea about what they want me to teach. I'd be fired for that. Summarily, if Fancy Lawyer had his way.
5:00 p.m. We're caucusing. There are some pissed off GTFs in this room. They have poked a hornets nest.
5:30 p.m. Done caucusing, calling the university back in. Aaaaaaaand we're back.
We're providing them with the numbers we asked them for re: dental and vision plan increases. We're also objecting to the notion that there's only a static amount of money for us, even as the university sees increases in revenue every year.
Now we're supplying them with the tuition numbers they claimed not to have. FY2012 was over $301M dollars. Predicted $11M increase by end of FY2014. Fancy Lawyer man nonsequiturously asks if we want it all, interrupting our female organizer for the 18th time in 2 hours. She continues presenting. We believe the university's response to our proposals do not fit the goals in their own benchmarking report. We also want to know why the university cannot provide us with concrete numbers, especially where we find them easy to obtain.
We're moving to the vision plan. A GTF will testify to the myriad problems with our vision benefit not meeting their needs. FYI, we get $200/yr for vision. This number was set a decade ago. Nowadays it barely covers the exam, let alone frames and lenses.
"Budgets are also moral documents. They are made by people who have choices." #GunsBlazing
This GTF pays $600/box for contacts, $114 dollars for lenses, $80-100 for frames. She has resorted to wearing the contacts for twice the recommended length of time. This has resulted in scratches to her eyes, and lenses falling out while she is driving. We offer the university the opportunity to question here. The university's questions revolve around how long she has been a GTF.
We're returning to our wage proposal. Another GTF will testify to the difficulties confronted by the 70% of our members who are between $400-$600 dollars short of the university's own cost of living estimate.
The GTF is a single parent, and is paying 1/3 of her salary every month for child care. On top this, she must eat, feed her child, clothe a growing child, pay for internet, rent, car costs, etc. Sadly, she is not a single case, or even an aberration.
"Even if I did not have a child, the cost of living would far exceed my salary."
She's taken out loans. The university is a loan mill nowadays, so they remain nonplussed.
5:48 p.m. Our organizer points out that the paltry stipends, and open animosity towards grads asking for a living wage, is antithetical to the university's mission to attract the best and brightest to come and work here, most especially the callousness the university displays towards grads who are parents.
5:50 p.m. We're emphasizing that the Trust means something to us. Its existence has value to us. We're talking about how the health care plan draws in prospective students. Last year, we had to make a decision due to GTFs with terminal illnesses spending their entire stipend on prescription drugs to treat their conditions. GTFs made the decision that we would cut alternative care visits in half to meet the needs of other members who were having a much harder time that the rest of us. The Trust matters because it gives us that power. It gives us autonomy. And we won't give that up. Period.
Now we're pointing out that the university doesn't even have anyone dedicated to administering health care. Because we have someone competent and experienced, we relieve the burden from the university. Additionally, the GTFs on the plan, who currently control how our plan is administered, have a different set of interests in their health care plan than the university has. We're able to take care of problems quickly, and at the lowest level. Putting this in the hands of the university unnecessarily involves a lot of bureaucracy.
Our organizer points out that if we were to agree to the proposed language, GTFs who require long-term care could have that coverage interrupted if/when the university switched our plan, and could even be forced to switch from seeing specialists they have been seeing for some time.
We're emphasizing that the university's proposal amounts to little more than an attempt to eliminate the Trust and circumvent the collective bargaining process. The university has always had the right to shop for alternate plans. They just have to do it through established channels. Which is exactly what this union-busting lawyer doesn't want to do.
They're now asking us for numbers we asked them for. Of course we once again provide them with their own data.
We're pointing out how, via our administration of the Trust, we've actually driven down health care costs. We're using actual numbers and data. Fancy Lawyer has the same look in his eye your cat does when it realizes there's nothing under it's paw when it catches the laser pointer light.
6:16 p.m. The Head of University Finance wants to know what transaction fees we pay for credit card transactions. Value added. #SaidNoOneEver Now he says he doesn't want the numbers. Our organizer points out, we'll bring whatever data they want to the table, and that we hope they reciprocate. We won't be holding our breath. Now he wants us to "look into" auto-enrollment. A convenient way to remove the need for union members to visit the union office...
6:20 p.m. Fancy Lawyer blames his unpreparedness on us. "We're the front of a very large body, as are you, the difference is, our aren't behind us." That should tell him something. His smugness is nauseating.
Sorting out rooms for the remaining sessions now. We're done here. Thanks for following along!
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