Best and the Brightest

One of the advantages of not being over-the-top with our rhetoric or demands is that when the university goes over-the-top with their rhetoric, they look like asses. Oh, I am sure that we cross the line sometimes and I am sure that University administrators are so far removed that they honestly think that $8000 a year sounds like a perfectly reasonable wage. Our members, however, take a very different view don't believe that asking for, say fee relief, is over-the-top. But when University administrators start condescending, our members go nuts.

I think a key here is that many grad unionist are very new to the union (because of the constant turnover) and even newer to bargaining. Usually grad unionists are only familiar with unions from what they know in the popular culture and the popular culture has not been good for unions as of late, so they kind of expect the union to be all high demands, fiery rhetoric and strike talk from day one. In other words, they expect their union to be unreasonable. We very deliberately do not live up to these expectations. One of the ways we do this, of course, is by surveying our members to find out what they want from bargaining and what they think is reasonable, then not setting our opening bargaining proposals much above that. We also do a thorough job of presenting the rationale behind our proposals to our members. We say, yeah, a 10% raise sounds like a lot, but your comparators earn more, the average wage is below the poverty line, you qualify for food stamps, the UO financial aid office says it costs more than you earn to attend the university, and you do 30% of the instructional work on campus, but get only 15% of the instructional pay. We do the same for all of our proposals. We sum it up in the mantra, "Never put anything on the table you don't believe in."

So, while our proposals may ask for a lot and we may know they UO can't afford everything we ask for, the proposals make sense and they have a solid basis. The same with our rhetoric. We show that GTFs, on average, earn below the poverty line. We say that it is shameful that the UO cannot make sure that all of its employees are not living in poverty. We don't dwell on it and we don't accuse the actual people across from us as being at fault or not caring about this. Hell, I want them to agree with me that it is bad and help us fix it. What the GTFF does not do is make it out like GTFs are starving to death. GTFs are poor--yes. GTFs struggle financially--yes. GTFs make difficult financial choices--yes. GTFs are living in cardboard boxes under overpasses--no. We don't compare ourselves to sweatshop labor. We religiously avoid references to slavery. We keep third-world workers out of our bargaining table presentations.

We do all of these things so that when the University decides to unleash a little sarcasm, blithely dismiss our proposals, condescend to the point of mockery, then they, as I said before, tend to look like asses. And, as much fun as that can be, the important thing is that it gets the membership on our side and fired up. It literally can convert a union skeptic into a leader in one afternoon. And all those people go out and tell their friends and the next thing you know your union is organizing. We've all heard that the bosses are the best organizers. Definitely true, and that's why we love having members come to bargaining, because you never know when the other side is going to go ahead and do all your organizing work for you.