What's going on with bargaining

I wish there was a lot to say, but there is not.

We've met with the UO twice since the break, to hear their proposals on both the economic articles and the non-economic articles.

Coming out of our firey pre-break session, the UO has been more willing to concede that we might have a point about some of the problems here at the UO, but they don't seem terribly interested in accepting our language or proposing new language to help solve the problem.

For instance, the UO is now willing to acknowledge that some GTFs might be asked/expected to overwork. In fact, they tell us some departments were already looking into the problem and still others agreed that it could be a problem. The UO's bargaining, however, would only go as far as saying that it was certainly a worthy topic of conversation and that perhaps more contract education at the departmental level would be in order.

They rejected our proposal that each department have a policy regarding the maximum number of students that can be assigned to a teaching GTF. They said they did so because our proposal would be an imperfect way to solve the problem, but, again, offered absolutely no alternative ways to approach the issue.

The UO took roughly the same approach to on the issue of criteria for satisfactory academic progress. Since December, we have been telling that UO that we think it is vital that the criteria for deciding whether a GTF is making satisfactory academic progress must be "specific and objective." As failure to maintain satisfactory academic progress is one of the very few reasons a GTF can be unilaterally fired and/or not have their application for work considered, we believe it is vital that these criteria be clear and straightforward.

Additionally, we have an experience from last year where a department on campus was leaving satisfactory academic progress up to the individual GTF's professor. Which could be theoretically fine, but it turns out that the department in question violated the heck out of their own hiring procedures and when called on it by the union, proceeded to claim that they were refusing to give work to certain graduate students because of lack of "satisfactory academic progress." The university asserted that since the determination as to whether the graduate student was making satisfactory academic progress was up to the advising professor, and it was an academic not labor decision, the GTFF could not question it. We were eventually successful in the grievance process, but we would, naturally, like to close this giant loophole in the hiring process.

The UO has no such desire. While they say that they, too, have no interest in making it possible for a department violate the contractual hiring procedures, then claim satisfactory academic progress, they have proposed no mechanism for doing so.

As far as economics, well, we don't really know what to say. The UO offered us raises of 1% and 3% over the next two years - which is what we proposed - no improvement on fees, and a health care proposal that was slightly better than their last proposal. The offered these proposals as a package, so we'd have to accept all or none. The they added a giant "BUT" into the conversation by letting us know that they were aware that Congress had passed health care reform and if that law had any impact on our health care plan, then their proposal would be null and void, even if we had already accepted it. In other words, we had to accept the entire package of proposals, but one part of their proposal might be void next fall and we'd need to re-bargain it.

As you can imagine, we did not accept this proposal and barely considered it a proposal at all.