Did Not See That Coming

The UO's initial offer on fees is a fee increase.

Not a huge increase mind you, $2 a term, but we'd also lose the cap on fees, so they could go up at any time. The UO suggests that if you want fees to go down you should take over the student government and vote them down.

That's right, in addition to working one third of the instructional hours at the UO, going to graduate school, getting your research done, finishing in 7 years, and trying to have some sort of life, you should also plan on running for student government. You know, a little something to do in your spare time.

Dean Linton warned me to watch my rhetoric on this issue. Which is kind of funny, because if he wanted me to watch my rhetoric, you'd think he would have come with maybe a fee decrease instead of an increase. But I will honor the man's request and watch my rhetoric.

The UO offered a fee increase for all GTFs.

If you do not earn the minimum wage or have children, your benefits in the next two years would get worse under the UO's proposals.

The UO proposed to take away the absolute cap on fees that is currently in place and replace it with a cap only on the fees they control. Your fees would go up if the ASUO votes to increase fees. (Maybe to help pay for a new arena?)

This offer sucks.

/watch

On wages, they offered to raise the minimum wages by 8% over two years. This isn't a bad offer at all. It's what they started out offering last year. It would cost them about $1 million over two years. I think. They weren't too terribly clear on how they got that figure. They basically admitted they made a semi-informed guess.

As far as wage offers go, I've seen worse. I've seen better mind you, but I have seen worse. Unfortunately, any goodwill engendered by the wage offer was more than wasted by the fee offer.

On the issue of "timely pay," the UO said "no." Oddly enough, they said no because the problem is so widespread they can't solve it for us because they can't solve it for any other employee group. Make sense? When pressed to explain or elucidate exactly which employee groups were suffering from late pay like GTFs are, the UO was unable to do so. But trust them, this is a widespread problem. Too big to be fixed. Except they're working on it. How are they working on it? They can't say.

They did come up with a creative little solution to the child care problem. They offered to knock $100 off the cost of cost of adding a kid to the health insurance. It's not the same thing and we haven't really looked at potential problems, but at least they spent more than 5 minutes thinking about this issue. Unlike, say, fees or timely pay.

So there we have it. The opening positions are staked out. Where we go from here is the fun part. The UO tries to convince us that their "million dollar offer" is that absolute best they can do. It's our job not to buy that. Actually, it's their job to convince us that their offer is pretty close to their best offer, so that we feel like any improvement to their opening offer is a "victory" for us. It is our job to stay focused on the need to eliminate fees on GTFs and not get caught up in "making a deal." Believe me, it's harder than it sounds.