One

We have our first bargaining session with the University this Thursday (tomorrow) from 10 am to noon in the Rogue Room of the EMU.

On the agenda is a discussion of the Ground Rules and possibly the two sides giving each other an overview of the reasons we opened the Articles we did.

There is a decent chance that this will not be the most exciting bargaining session ever, but it will give you an introduction to the players, an idea of how these things work, and, you never know, there may just be some pointed back and forth.

If you're on campus and you have nothing better to do, you should pop in and check it out.

Comparator Data

So this post kicks off the round of what we call "CBA Bargaining" as opposed to "Health Care Bargaining." From now until roughly March, we'll be bargaining with the university over wages, fees, and working conditions.

I've heard from a few of you that your departments are freaking out about the possibility that we might get raises and that would destroy their departmental budget. The bargaining team is well aware of the current state of the UO's budget. The way we see it, it is our job to go to the bargaining table and tell the UO what GTFs want and need. Conversely, it is the UO's job to tell us what they can (or cannot) afford to do for GTFs along those lines. The people who represent the UO are generally pretty good at what they do, so you can rest assured that if cuts to fees or raises do come down the pike, the UO has the money to pay for them.

One of the main ways we determine what kind of raises GTFs need is to look at comparator data. The UO has eight AAU-designated comparator schools. We've been looking at this data over the last decade as we bargain with the UO. We started out about 30% behind the average earned by grad employees at our comparator schools, but have caught up to the point where we're only 5% behind.

How this data will mesh with our thinking about fees and budgets is still to be determined, but I thought I'd throw the comparator data up here when we had it. Maybe you can tell us what you're thinking about wages and fees in light of this data.

A "Toby Prompts Me to Work" Post

So we wheeled, we dealed. Nothing much happened.

I won't recap (see below), but will narrate.

The UO came in and offered us a deal whereby they would agree to give the GTFF $150,000 a year so that we can buy an increased annual cap. If you're saying to yourself, "But wait! Doesn't the GTFF believe that there is already contract language that requires the UO to give us $250,000 a year to buy mare cap?" then you are on the ball and a candidate for the next bargaining team.

We politely declined their offer and told them we were not interested in pursuing an agreement along these lines, as we are pretty confident that we are going to win a grievance that will require them to pay us $250,000. We also pointed out that it would take roughly three years to hoard enough money to be able to purchase a cap increase.

We counter-offered with the idea that they would automaticaly cover any increase up to 13% next year and 85% of any increase after that. They seemed genuinely interested. They asked us to go back to the office and write something up. We did. They asked us many questions about our proposal and went for a long caucus.

We got to thinking that maybe, just maybe they were thinking about accepting our proposal.

No such luck.

They came back and told us that they would be more interested in something like a 5% guarantee and then, if the renewal next year went over that, we could just agree to bargain. Or maybe split increase over 5% halvsies.

Given that this was the least we would expect to get in bargaining next year, it doesn't seem like reason to drop our grievance and give up $250,000 this year.

We are pursuing the grievance. We had our meeting with the UO's greievance officer and it went fine. We await his ruling.

Wheeling, Yes. Dealing? Maybe.

Friday - 1 pm - Umpqua Room

We meet tomorrow for what is either going to be the final session where we get a deal or the last session before a big break. At the last session, both sides affirmed our desire to reach a settlement before PacificSource's tentative deadline of September 1st. We both floated some ideas, but the UO indicated that they really weren't in love with our ideas. Their idea, however, is expensive. Puzzling, since they are supposed to be very concerned about costs.

To review:

It turns out that the UO and GTFF have very different interpretations of Appendix I. The GTFF believes that the second paragraph obligates the UO to pay an additional $250K this year for buying a higher annual cap. The UO argues that this language means that they are obligated to maintain the $250K payment they made last year.

Both sides seem genuine that their interpretation of the language is the one they thought they bargained into the contract last year. I know sure as shit that this is what the GTFF thought we were bargaining. The GTFF filed a grievance and the UO has agreed that the best course of action is to let the grievance process play out. While that happens, the UO would be obligated to maintain its health care payments at the same level as last year, so nothing much would change in the Fall term.

In an effort to wrap bargaining up before then and to make everyone feel more comfortable about next year, the two parties agreed to try to find ground common enough that we wouldn't need to grieve or continue bargaining.

Along those lines, the GTFF floated two ideas (as opposed to proposals. There were just ideas we were kicking around, not formal proposals, which is why they are so vague). The first would be to reinstate language in the CBA that would require the UO to guarantee to pay a large portion of any increase that came along next year. This way GTFs would be indemnified against facing a large increase in their costs for families or summer for two years. Our other idea was for the UO to kick in more money for the summer, lowering costs for everyone and making it easier to buy, so fewer GTFs would have to decide to go without health insurance in the summer.

We liked these two ideas because, while it seemed like the goal of increasing the cap was out of reach this year, stability and access/affordability are two of our other goals.

The UO had a different idea. They wanted to find out how much it would cost to raise the cap to something more than $250K (where it is now), but something less than $1,000,000, which is what we are proposing. They needed us to get the dollar figure to them before they would commit to saying that they wanted to roll with that idea.

I just sent them data that indicates that it would only be about $44K cheaper to have a $500K cap instead of a $1M cap. It breaks down like this (figures based on a comparison to the costs from last year):

$250K cap = -$75K
$500K cap = +$188K
$1M cap = +$232K

I don't know what the UO will do with this info. The ball is sort of in their court, since they said they didn't really like our ideas. So, tomorrow we'll see what shakes out. I know that the GTFF is more than prepared to walk away from the table if the UO is not willing to give us a deal we like. We're confident we'll win the grievance and the UO will owe us $250K and we'll be able to buy that $1M cap eventually.

Should be exciting, see you there.

Belated Update, Last Minute Anouncement

Last July 23, the union made its opening proposal for health care bargaining. Not surprisingly, we asked the UO to pay the entire cost of the increase in health insurance costs. Since the the cost of renewal is pretty cheap, the UO didn't really say anything about it.

Dean Linton did ask a question, though. He was wondering if the GTFF had done any surveys or had systematically asked our members in any way if they were concerned about the cost of health insurance and the ratio of how much the UO spends on health insurance to how much they spend on wages. He explained he was asking because, apparently, they hear from many faculty and staff that they would rather receive money in the form of pay and buy their own health insurance or spend the money however they wanted as individuals.

I told him that we had not conducted any such surveys, but in my seven years of working for the GTFF, I have not had a single GTF mention to me that they would rather not have the health care and get more money. I did mention that if any GTF was concerned about the health care to wages ratio, they would probably be more interested in seeing their wages go up. I mean it was just sitting there, so I couldn't ignore it, but I also didn't want to make too big of a deal of it.

I doubt that Rich was asking only because he was interested in GTF attitudes to health care/wage ratios, but more to set up the "if you want health care, you need to be prepared to give up wages" line, which is, of course, his job. We should hear more about this when the UO makes a counter-proposal.

Speaking of which, we hear that counter-proposal tomorrow. Thursday, August 6 at 3 pm in the Umpqua Room of the EMU. This will be our first taste of the UO's rhetoric concerning the budget crisis. Fortunately, we are not asking for much, so we don't expect a lot of it, but, again, they kind of have to roll it out just to set up bargaining for next fall. But then, you never know what they have up their sleeve.

My worst fear is that they propose "bargaining" wages and fees now, offering a wage freeze or something in exchange for paying the minimal cost increase for health care. This would be unfortunate because it would complicate what should be a very simple health care negotiation.

Next Meeting

Thursday, July 23. 10 am. Room 122 of the Knight Library.

Openings

This is the text of a presentation the GTFF gave to the UO to open bargaining. This info informed our coming proposal:

Two decisions we made last year impact this year’s bargaining.
• The UO agreed to contribute an additional $250K to increase the maximum benefit cap.
• We moved from paying for the administration of the health care plan from a per capita basis to a lump sum basis

Renewal numbers look good.

Last year we had thirteen large claims that caused a rather large renewal. 15.6%. We agreed to increase the UO’s contribution by $250,000 to increase the maximum cap and ended up with an 18.5% increase to the overall cost of the plan.

This year things are significantly different. There have been fewer large claims for much smaller amounts.

Because the UO has committed an additional $250,000 to increasing the cost of the cap, this is the only benefit change we are looking to make this year and we have asked PacificSource to give us renewals figures only for the cap increase.

PASS OUT SHEETS

*All costs are estimates, as they are dependent on enrollment numbers.

PacificSource gave us three different versions of the renewal with a cap increase. We are, of course, only interested in the cheapest of these three versions - $1M cap with $250K pooling.

• Pooling – bit complicated, think I have it.
• Re-insurance
• For next year’s renewal, PS can only apply $250K toward the Trust’s experience.
• $150K cost more than $250K because our risk is $250K now, to go down to $150K would represent a lowering in our risk – more risk for PacificSource, so more expensive.

This option increases the cost of the plan by $182K, which is below the UO’s agreed contribution level of $250,000.

This renewal is 3.43%, which is significantly less than we saw last year and many other years.

Lump Sum:

• Used to build into the cost of the plan a per capita dollar amount to pay for administration. Due to the difficulty of accurately and continuously adjusting this per-person dollar figure, it was agreed during bargaining last year that it would be better if the UO paid a lump sum for administering the Trust.

• We agreed on the figure of $75K to pay for administration costs, and COBRA.

• It turns out that the $75K might not be adequate for the Trust to meet its obligations. As it stands now, the GTFF, the union, routinely pays the Trust expenses -to avoid unnecessary duplication and to keep costs down - and gets reimbursed through a quarterly billing. It is looking like the $75K is not enough for the Trust to pay what it owes the GTFF and the union ends up subsidizing the Trust. This was, of course, not the intent of our agreement about the lump sum last year.

• We are currently doing work to get an accurate accounting of how much the Trust would need to cover its obligation and expect to have it shortly, but for now we wanted to let you know that we plan to bring a proposal for Section 4.

Although we don’t have precise figures yet, we can say with confidence that the total costs of our proposals will not be more than $250,000 above last years costs for the UO.

Obviously, you miss the delicious back-and-forth, but you get the gist.

Hope to see at the next session.