The Work Starts Now

At the General Membership Meeting last night, over 100 members of the GTFF voted to send an important proposed bylaws change to the full membership for a vote. Our current bylaws make it practically impossible for the GTFF to hold a strike authorization vote. The regulations require a 65% quorum on an authorization vote. The extremely high quorum would essentially mean that a strike authorization would need a 65% 'YES' vote in order to pass, as unions never assume any kind of 'NO' vote turning out. The high quorum may have made sense when the GTFF had 400 full members, but we now have close to 1000 and getting 650 GTFs to vote at all would be a herculean task.

Even if the proposed changes go through, however, there will be a lot of work ahead of us. First, we do need to get those changes made. The bylaws vote will serve to test our ability to turn out hundreds of votes. We need to get at least the same quorum we would need on a strike vote. This is will probably be the biggest test for the GTFF in my time there.

Of course, none of this would be necessary if the UO hadn't essentially declared themselves done bargaining. At least, they declared themselves done putting more money on the table. Just to review, the UO has put enough money on the table to raise the minimum wage by 4% each of the next two years OR reduce fees by $90 per term (with no cap on future increases) OR raise the annual cap on health insurance.

The bargaining team finds the UO's proposals unacceptable. GTFs deserve all three and more. We understand that it might not be possible to get everything, but that GTFs cannot settle for this little.

The UO is betting that GTFs are willing to settle for very little, rather than doing the work that it necessary to show them that this is unacceptable. They are banking on the fact that you are busy, that grad school is hard enough, and that, in the end, we are not a union, but just grad students who will take whatever they are offered and be grateful for it.