A Difference of Opinion

As suspected, the UO started out their economic presentation by asserting that the total compensation that GTFs receive is very competitive, on the order of $60 and hour, and very, very generous. The UO then promised to give us an "exceptional offer" that would "elevate GTF compensation." The proposals were characterized as "generous" several times.

Wages:
Increases to the minimum wage of 1% for next year and 2% for the year after that.

Less than half of GTFs get paid the minimum wage. Some departments that pay more than the minimum wage also give their GTFs a raise, but most do not.

A 1% raise is about $95 a year, $31.67 per term, or $10.55 per month. It costs the UO approximately $80,000 a year to give GTFs who earn the minimum a 1% raise.

Fees:
The UO offered to pay the departmental - or resource - fee starting next year.

About 178 GTFs in the College of Education, the College of Music, the Lundquist College of Business, and Computer Science paid these fees this year.

The total amount they paid in fees this year is approximately $84,000.

Health care:
The UO proposed to pay for health care in 2010-11 exactly what they paid in 2009-10. In other words, GTFs would be responsible for paying for all health care cost increases next year.

A 10% cost increase to health care would be roughly $490,000. For GTFs to raise this amount among themselves, as the UO proposal would have it, GTFs would need to raise their summer payments by an additional $500. We could pass some of these costs on to dependents of GTFs, but the higher those costs go, the fewer people enroll and we're back to jacking up summer costs.


Those were the UO proposals. If you are like the bargaining team, you may be wondering how the UO could characterize these proposals as "generous." After all, the most likely outcome for the majority of GTFs would be significant increases in health care costs and nothing else.

The UO made these assertions that, in their minds, resulted in their proposals being very generous:

First, Rich Linton emphasized that tuition had gone up again this year and the UO continued to "forgo" revenue that they would have gotten from you if they were not so generous with the tuition waivers. Rich emphatically emphasized to us that the UO's proposals could have been much, much worse for us and, in that light, the UO had really gone the extra mile for GTFs this year.

Second, Marianne Nicols disputed the notion that one could calculate the amount of money it would cost the UO to pay for departmental fees by simply multiplying the number of GTFs by the amount of money they paid this year ($84,000). Instead, she asserted, it was more proper to consider the amount of money departments might have raised if they had charged departmental fees this year, but didn't because the UO was discouraging the practice as part of a planned phase out of departmental fees, and the amount departments would raise them next year if they could. So she gets the figure of somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000, but can't terribly accurate with this number because no one really knows how much departments might have charged in departmental fees next year if they could charge departmental fees.

Lastly, Linda King encouraged us not to look at the UO's offer on health care as pushing all cost increases for next year onto GTFs, but rather as the UO remaining committed to paying what they paid this year as a ground floor. In other words, the UO could have proposed cuts to health care for next year, but they did not, so it was very generous of them.

The bargaining team rejected these assertions and let the UO know we were not viewing the proposals as generous at all, but as negative proposals, given that the average GTF was likely (almost certainly) to see a decrease in benefits from the UO.

The way we see it is that the UO's total benefit improvements for next year are a 1% raise to the minimum wage ($80,000) and the elimination of departmental fees ($84,000). A total of $164,000 in new benefits.

Conversely, if health care costs go up by 4% then GTFs will collectively need to come up with $208,880.

On the individual level, a GTF who works in a department that does not charge a departmental fee and pays the minimum wage will see a $10 a month raise and an unknown increase in insurance costs.

A GTF who works in a department that charges a departmental fee could save up to $2100 a year, but most would save more like $600 a year. Again, with the unknown increase in health insurance costs.

A GTF who works in a department that pays more than the minimum and doesn't charge a resource fee (the majority of GTFs) would see no increase in benefits and faces unknown cost increases in health insurance.

Again, the bargaining team does not see a way to characterize these proposals as anything other than a negative package from the UO that will almost certainly cost the vast majority of GTFs money in the coming year.

Lastly, we were disturbed by the UO's tone throughout their presentations. While the GTFF team was very careful to always speak of the progress that the GTFF and the UO had made together over the years on catching up to our comparators, the UO spoke only of their generosity. For instance, the UO asserted that the UO had done marvelous things for GTFs in the past decade. The UO gave generous wage increases. The UO had made dramatic increases in health care costs. The UO claimed all credit for our shared successes without acknowledging that the union exists.

Additionally, no where in the UO's presentation was any kind of acknowledgment that the work that GTFs do is vital to the UO. While they would very much like you to think of your tuition waiver as "forgone revenue" for the UO, they gave no indication that they valued GTF labor or that you might not be here if it were not for the tuition waiver. The UO quite literally took the stance that they give and give and give and they wanted us to acknowledge how super that is.

Combined with Dean Linton's insistence that we understand their proposals could have been much, much worse if he wanted them to be, the bargaining team could not help but walk away from the table thinking that the UO thinks of GTFs as little more than ungrateful children.

Unfortunately, the UO's attitude does not help us get closer to a bargaining resolution. Our position at the table has always been that the union and university share the twin problems of the need to remain competitive with our comparators and a bad budget climate in Oregon. Given these factors we kept our proposals modest. The UO, however, is taking the stance that they are already competitive and generous and that is the the only factor that the union needs to understand. They are not creating space for dialogue and problem solving, but making bargaining a test of who has more resolve. This is not how the GTFF prefers to bargain, but the UO has left us little room for maneuver. This is double unfortunate because the UO's proposals are not very good.