The Statement Not Given

The following the text of a speech/statement that was written for our last bargaining session with the UO (Monday, 3/17/08). The team debated whether or not to make this statement. Some felt it could come off as childish and/or whiny. Others felt that it made a powerful statement and could get the membership fired up. In the end, Dean Linton preempted any statement by opening the session telling us that the UO had put all the money it was going to on the table already and nothing we had to say was going to change that. So we didn't give any statement at all, but instead made it clear (hopefully) to the UO that their proposals were unacceptable and the GTFF felt compelled to move on to the "action" phase of bargaining.

So here is the statement that we didn't deliver to the UO. While the team did debate whether or not to give it in bargaining, I think it is a decently fair representation of the frustrations that team, and many members, feel about bargaining so far.

Looking at your proposals from Friday made one thing very clear. You just don’t think that GTFs are important.

You say that GTFs are unimportant when you offer wages that would keep GTFs below the poverty line. When those wages are below average with our comparators.

You let us know that you think GTFs are unimportant when you ignore all of our presentations on fees. You have not responded to a single one of our arguments about fees. GTFs returning 6 to 26 percent of their pay to the university? Unimportant. Half of GTFs seeing a reduction in real income? Unimportant. GTFs paying different rates of fees than undergrads? Unimportant. This bargaining team telling you that fee elimination was our top priority? Unimportant.

We brought you the issue of timely pay. As far as we can tell, GTFs are the only group of employees on this campus that routinely get paid late. We all know why. We’re unimportant. Our paperwork gets shuffled to the bottom of the stack. If it was important to the UO that GTFs get paid on time, you’d do it. Instead you proposed a committee to look into the situation and make non-binding “recommendations.” We’ve seen the university's non-binding recommendations in action and we want no part of it. Not that we were important enough to be invited to be on the committee mind you. In all honesty, we hope your committee works out. We hope that GTFs all get paid on time next Fall. And this way you can avoid paying the late remedy penalty of $100 to any GTF and everyone will be happy. We understand that we are not important enough to actually have a seat at the table, but we have no interest in legitimizing that process by pretending a Q&A session is going to make anything better.

On the subject of vacation, I don’t know if you exactly think research GTFs are unimportant, but you certainly showed that you think this bargaining team is stupid. The first time you responded to our vacation proposal you tried the phrase “shall have the opportunity to be granted up to 10 days of vacation.” The second time you responded you tried “shall be allowed up to 10 days.” Allowed implies permission. Permission that can be granted or not granted, depending on whim.

Of course, nothing demonstrates how little you care for the lives of your GTFs than your rejection of our proposal to increase the annual cap on health insurance. We are sickened that the University can be cold to its employees. We are stunned that your proposal could allow the same thing that happened to Stephano to happen to any other GTF. We know it will happen. Apparently the UO is fine with the proposition that a certain number of GTF’s lives will be destroyed by its out-moded health care plan, but, like Stephano, that’s apparently unimportant and easily ignored.

We understand that if we could throw long passes, hit a three point jumpers, break records on the track, or play baseball that someone at this university would find a way to get us what we need, but we don’t. No one lines up to watch us work. We don’t pack ‘em in. We do however, work 30% of the instructional FTE on this campus. We lead your discussion sections. We lead your labs. We grade your papers. We hold office hours. We respond to e-mails. We teach the first term freshman what a thesis statement is. We stay over night in the lab monitor experiments. We do all the academic shit work on this campus that you are too good to do. We believe that this university cannot function without us.

To accept your proposals would be to agree with you that we are unimportant. We reject that proposition and we reject your proposals.

Here are our proposals exactly as you saw them last time. We want to make progress on the contract. We are desperate to make progress. But we cannot make progress that would hurt us in the long run. Unfortunately, accepting the proposition that we should be earning less than our comparators is not progress. Accepting an elimination of the cap on fees is not progress. Accepting continually stagnant benefits is not progress. Accepting that health care cannot be updated is not progress. And accepting that 8% of the cost of health care is all the benefits that GTFs should expect, is the exact opposite of progress.

If you honestly feel that we are unimportant and you can live without our labor on this campus, I guess we’ll find out. I hope this is not the case and that your proposals will look much better the next time we meet.

human cost = financial cost

I think it is safe to say that bargaining yesterday with the University was at the very least disappointing or at the very most insulting. So much of it was utterly frustrating and unexpectedly cold. I'm not sure if it was the fear caused by so many GTFs in the room (thanks for coming out! the Union is only strong when we all stand together), the uncomfortable heat and stuffiness, a calculated bargaining tactic, or their lack of comprehension. My biggest frustration in the process is the University's continual approach of ignoring our arguments. When they come with concerns about our proposals, we consider them and make specific responses to them. Sometimes we attempt to accommodate them, and yes sometimes we outright reject them as unsubstantiated. But when they come back to us on our proposals, they never actually refer to our arguments with specific counterarguments or logic. We just get vague, "the University has done all it can do."

No other point spells out our frustration more than their response on Health Insurance. As many of you know we have an acute need to raise the cap on yearly individual costs. Last session we gave a 45 minute presentation on the importance of our insurance and the need to make improvements in the light of higher costs. The presentation included a tearfully moving all-too-personal narrative from one of our members about his painful experience and how his child's coverage was cut off during their greatest need. Yesterday they never mentioned the human cost of not raising the cap and gave no arguments against the urgency of raising the cap NOW. Instead we heard arguments about the financial shock at the high costs of renewing the current plan and the financial burden the University could not take on if they raised the cap, a cost of about 300K. So while the University has a 450 million dollar operating budget per year and is about to build a new 250 million dollar arena, they can't help the GTFs who will have to choose between going into financial ruin or not seeking medical care (with life-altering consequences) because they can't afford it. While the University may be comfortable with ignoring human costs in favor of financial costs, the GTFF doesn't have the stomach for it.

Trembling at the Sound of Their Silence

On Tuesday, we once again played our dangerous game with our old adversary....the University. It reminded me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin all right.

Tuesday's session was weird, but, unfortunately, all part of the bargaining game. The GTFF gave the UO our counter-proposals on non-economic issues - vacation, office space, faculty training, catering, safety - the UO sat passively looking pissy about everything we said, received our proposals without much comment, caucused for about 15 minutes, then informed us they had nothing further to say and we could all go home.

Anybody who witnessed this session and was not familiar with the bargaining game might have thought that we were very far apart on these proposals and that things were not going well. In truth, we're pretty close on these proposals and we probably could have hammered out any differences between the two parties in about 15 minutes of serious negotiation.

So, why the disparity between reality and pose? It goes something like this:

At the end of bargaining on Friday, I mentioned to the UO that we would be bringing non-economic proposals that the GTFF thought would get us really close to settling. The UO expressed pleasure. But, when we made the proposals on Tuesday, the UO had to act all pissed off about them. You see, by reacting negatively, the GTFF is put in a position where we start to wonder that we did "wrong." Why don't they like our proposals? Isn't this what they said they wanted? Could we have done better? What can we do so that they like them next time? These are all the questions that pop up in your mind when you give someone something that you think they are going to like, but they don't. Now we have 10 days to sit and stew and wonder and try to figure out how we can please the other side next time.

Also, now I am in a position of discomfort. Because the UO proposes next, I should have 10 relatively peaceful days of just waiting to hear their response. By reacting negatively to my proposals, my 10 days just transformed into 10 days of worry about what they might be bringing. How bad can it get? What didn't they like? Not knowing what it was they didn't like, my mind races around trying to come up with compromises to the dozens of different possible objections.

And then, days from now, they can walk in the room and agree to almost everything we proposed. Relief! Joy! Gratitude! Now, I have forgotten that it was actually our compromises that got us to agreement and I am grateful to the UO for not doing all the horrible things I have been brooding on for 10 days. They are heroes! We got what we wanted! Maybe we should go easier on them on the economic stuff, no? Isn't great to agree! Even if they modify our proposals to benefit them, I am still glad, because their proposals are not as bad as we imagined they might be.

So this is the game. Hopefully, knowing the game helps me avoid falling in the trap. We'll find out I guess. Maybe by writing this, I am changing their strategy. Maybe I was wrong all along and they hate the proposals and we in for some fighting. We'll find out next Friday. In the meantime, I think I'll just sit back and listen to the rock and roll.

In The Event of An Earthquake, Your Contract May Be Void

We met with the university on Friday. The GTFF gave them our second round of economic proposals. Unfortunately, the UO's economic proposals were so bad, we were kind of forced to go with the same proposals as we had previously put forward. In bargaining we have a phrase, "bargaining against myself," which comes up with the other party gives you a null proposal. The phrase is usually used in conjunction with "I'm not going to." In other words, if we propose something and the other team just says "no," we're not going to come back with anything new, as we'd be bargaining against ourselves, throwing out proposals until we found one the university could live with. So, refusing to bargain against ourselves, we came with much the same stuff as last time.

To save your scrolling finger, I'll summarize.

We started with fees. We asked for a complete elimination of all fees that graduate employees pay. Well, before we asked, we did a little presentation where we reviewed some of the reasons fees is agenda item #1 and gave them several reasons for rejecting their proposal. I thought it went well. At least they can't walk away from the table without knowing we're pretty serious about fees.

We then moved on to health care. This past week has not been a good one for the GTFF health care plan. The increase to the cost next year will be high. Plus, we were in the unenviable position of having to ask for new benefits, or, as I like to call them, "updates to the plan." As some of you are learning, the cap on annual insurance benefits on our plan is an all-too-low $100,000. One of your colleagues gave a very moving presentation about what can happen when you or your dependent hits that cap in the middle of a hospital stay. Additionally, we let the UO know that we had to change the birth control benefit so that they are free for GTFs again. The renewal is a lot of money though. We're going to have to see what happens on this.

We hit wages next. We lowered our proposed increase to the minimum from 10% over two years to 8% over two years. This matches the UO proposal. There is a decent chance that this figure could change, however, given that we are so far apart on fees.

We also gave them a little grief for ignoring our proposal on the issue of timely pay. Awhile back, we explained to the UO that many, upwards of 100, GTFs were getting paid late. Of these GTFs, many had signed their contract well in advance of the coming academic year. We proposed that if a GTF signed their contract by September 1, but still got paid late, they would receive an automatic $100 "late-pay remedy." The UO did not like this proposal. They turned down the proposal cold by arguing that figuring out who would be eligible for the remedy would be complicated and that this problem was widespread and they are totally trying to fix it. On Friday, we let them know that we were not sympathetic to their problems, as GTFs getting paid late was more burdensome than figuring out who should get the remedy. We also argued that we could find no proof that anyone but GTFs were getting paid late, but even if the problem were widespread, we'd still offer our proposal as an inducement to fixing the problem.

That's when one of the UO team members raised a couple of objections to our proposal. First, he wanted to know, what happens if the UO is unable to pay GTFs on time through no fault of their own? What if, say, an earthquake prevented the payroll office from getting checks out? Would GTFs still get the bonus? And what if a GTF wasn't harmed by the late pay? In legal circles, you have to prove that you were harmed before you can collect any money. We shot back that if the UO wanted to write an "Act of God" exemption to this article, we'd take a look at it. We also let the UO know that we would just go ahead and consider the $100 a payment for pain and suffering, but if they thought that, say, $78 was a better figure, we'd be happy to look at that too.

That pretty much ended the show.