bargaining 37 stuff

CECIL RALLIES FACULTY FOR 14.5%, OR STRIKE:

Bargaining: Tuesday 9/3/2013, 1pm-4pm(?), Room 122 or 101 Knight Library.

9:00 AM: Gottfredson meeting with his $100K a month bargaining team:

The most recent admin proposal was for 10.5%. On Thursday the union countered with 14.5% – down from their initial 18%. Gottfredson’s team is meeting now to finalize the proposal they will present to the faculty at 10AM 1PM today – be there.

Raises: The elevator version:

We’re going down. During the first year of President Gottfredson’s administration UO faculty pay has fallen still further behind other AAU public universities:

• Full profs: down from 85% to 82% 
• Associate profs: down from 92% to 90% 
• Assistant profs: down from 93% to 89%

Their conclusion is that while both effects are at work, Bowen effects dominate in public research universities, with $2 in increases due to administrators seizing on increased revenue for every $1 in increases due to upward pressures on faculty and staff salaries from other industries. Same for private research institutions. What’s more, they find a plausible culprit within universities. They notice that cost increases are likelier when the ratio of staff to faculty is higher. That suggests that when administrators within the university accumulate bargaining power, they’re better able to force increases in costs. The administrative staff, they suggest, is what’s really driving this.

By administrative staff, they presumably mean central administrators like Jim “38%” Bean. Say Jim, any update on how much our administration is going to piss away in Portland this year? Thanks to an anonymous reader for the link. From the WaPo’s excellent “The Tuition is Too Damn High” series, inspired by:

9/1/2013 Bloat update: Lots of rumors flying around – and I didn’t start all of them – that the administration’s haste to wrap up bargaining is motivated in part by a desire to get the economics off the table before the latest administrative bloat data comes out:

From: Bill Harbaugh 
Subject: public records request, non-classified employees
Date: September 1, 2013 11:55:21 PM PDT
To: Lisa Thornton Cc: J P Monroe , [email protected], Andrea Larson , [email protected], [email protected]

Dear Ms Thornton:

This is a public records request for a machine readable file in excel, comma delimited, or any other standard format showing the following information for UO non-classified employees as of 9/3/2013:

First Name, Last Name, MI, University Email Address, University Office Address, University Office Phone Area Code, University Office Phone Number, Employee Type, Academic Title, Job Type, Job Title Job Start Date, Yrs in Position, Fac Prim Activity, Home Department, Rank, Rk Date, Pay Department, Annual Salary Rate, Appt Percent Job Status, Job End Date, Appointment Status, Term of Service, EEO Type, FT/PT

I ask for a fee waiver on the basis of public interest.

I’m ccing a few people in the UO IR office, who should be able to easily provide these data.

The prior data on this is from the error ridden Beangrams, and the most excellent presentations of the AAUP’s Howard Bunsis. March 2013 update for UO here:

“Institutional Support” means central administration, more or less.

Tuesday 9/3/2013, 10am-4pm, room 122 or 101 Knight Library, be there.

Rumor from the spectators at the annual faculty club ping-pong semi-finals is that Gottfredson has told Geller and Rudnick to stop their $100K a month billing frenzy and cut a deal, quick. The large faculty turnout at the Thursday meeting had its intended effect, and Rudnick’s flip-out didn’t hurt either.

Rudnick will apparently meet with Gottfredson et al at 9AM to get his instructions. As you can see from the spreadsheet below the union has already come down from 19.3% over 3 years (compounded) to 15%, and has made concessions on health, childcare, and promotion raises as well. The majority of the faculty I’ve talked with feel that if the union offer is not acceptable as is, we should strike during week one.

The bargaining will start at 10:00 AM. Show up Tuesday and find out what concessions Gottfredson is prepared to make on governance and on Geller’s “we own your IP and everything on your computer” proposals. The word from the spectators on Th was that the process and personalities were “interesting”, but not so distracting that you couldn’t get a few reviews done, if you sit in the back. And fun to socialize with your colleagues during the breaks. Not to mention the excellent homemade baked things – consider this a public records request for the recipe.

Synopsis from session XXXVI, Thursday 8/29:

• Practice drill for strike goes off well. ~100 faculty show up on a summer day when they’re not even on contract. News on the SEIU strike preparation in the ODE here.
• Some chatter about discipline for Rudnick over her disrespectful treatment of faculty and library staff this morning. Does UO’s respectful workplace policy apply to $300 an hour lawyers? 
• Union holds firm on raises, only minor concessions. Rudnick seems to have new instructions from Coltrane, sounds ready to deal.
• After lunch, still about 60 faculty in the room. No visible support for the admin team. No Altmann, no Moffitt, no Geller, no one with any actual authority to deal. No wonder this takes forever.
• After getting all medieval on me for “posting of false and inaccurate information about bargaining” the administration’s bargaining team is now trying to keep me from posting copies of the presumably fact-based transcripts they’ve been taking at every bargaining session – their stenographer has been typing away all day. Latest here. 
• Art 49, use of UO computers, a.k.a as the Stasi Clause. They own you.

Your Guarantee of Truthiness: All UO Matters bargaining posts are fact-checked by Geller and Rudnick’s secret team of well paid consultants, who post their spin on the official UO Admin site, here. If you pay Dave Hubin $285.98 he’ll even tell you who wrote it.

Proposals so far:

Here’s hoping this bargaining gets wrapped up quickly, so Sharon Rudnick and her HLGR colleagues can get back to their important civil rights work – for Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds: