Posts tagged as “GTFF”

Letter from the President: We Have a Deal! Late last night, we reached a tentative agreement with UO administration for our next contract. After 14 hours of intensive mediation (and an awesome accompanying sit-in in the EMU!), and despite a shady 11th-hour move by the UO bargaining team, we were…

Update 10/26: A bit more from reporter . Gina Scalpone in the ODE here: The bargaining teams for University of Oregon and the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation issued a joint statement Friday, according to the UO Human Resources website: “We had the most productive meeting that we have ever had bargaining…

The meeting, 3PM in 253 Straub, is open to the public under the ACP policy passed last year. Meanwhile the UO administration is developing its plans to hire faculty scabs, and faculty union Pres Chris Sinclair has issued guidance on how to avoid this fate. Remember, the best outcome for…

10/18/2019 update from the GTFF:

Over the last three days, over 85% of the membership has cast ballots in our strike authorization vote, and 1,044 grad employees—over 95% of voters—said Yes! We’re standing firm: no cuts to health care and a fair contract NOW!

I still think President Schill will come to his senses on this, but if not the strike will presumably start Nov. 4th.

Update: Deans asking undergrads and faculty to scab on grad students

The former would be CAS divisional Dean Hal Sadofsky, asking faculty to help find undergrads to do the work of GEs. The link for sign-ups has now been taken down or moved.  The latter would be SOMD Dean Sabrina Madison-Cannon:

I am asking Area Heads for the following information:

• Please identify faculty in your area (including yourself) who do not have a full workload for fall term.
• Please identify faculty in your area (including yourself) who are willing to volunteer their services during a strike even if they have a full workload.

UAUO Pres Chris Sinclair has the following advice for faculty on how to avoid becoming a scab:

Full pdf here.

10/17/2019: What should faculty do if our GE’s strike?

The GTFF and the Administration proposals are very close, and the administration can avoid a strike simply by agreeing to cover most of any increases in health care costs for years 2 and 3 of the contract. That’s pretty much it. This is the same deal SEIU just got – for PEBB, which is a much more expensive insurance plan.

On the off chance they don’t, UAUO Pres Chris Sinclair gives this advice to faculty on their obligations during the ensuing strike:

Our GE’s are voting this week on authorizing a strike, probably starting week 6. Presumably other deans are also planning on how to maintain undergraduate educative production – or at least pretend they are maintaining it – should the UO administration continue its quixotic effort to cut graduate students’ health…

President Schill badly needs a few JH insiders who will tell him when he’s being stupid. But he’s fired them all. So now it’s up to the unions: It’s Not About the Massages The UO Administration has been spreading the rumor around campus that the GTFF is about to go…

My quick read is that this still amounts to real cuts in wages (for many if not most GEs) and in health benefits (for all GE’s): Dear Faculty Colleagues, Just a note to share with you the university’s latest offer in negotiations with GTFF. I’m forwarding a copy of an…

That’s the rumor, now confirmed. Impasse begins the ~30 day cooling-off period before they can strike. From what I can tell the administration’s intransigence on this is driven by a paternalistic belief that they know what’s best for the grad students – less health care – and a refusal to…

This is just weird. All along the administration has been saying that their primary goal was to increase GTFF pay so we looked better in the metrics and could attract better grad students – I guess meaning ones who care about pay and not benefits. So what to make of…

That’s the rumor from down at the faculty club. More soon.

No they didn’t. The Administration *bargains* with the GTFF. The Mediator *mediates* between the Administration and the GTFF. That’s pretty much the whole point of mediation. And while I’m on it, why is the Administration still claiming they are “the university?”.  I thought Frank Stahl won that one. And while…

You wouldn’t know it from today’s Around the O post on the administration’s bargaining proposals, but the US Western Region CPI-U has been increasing at about 3% for the past few years: Assuming that continues, the “salary increases” the UO administration is offering the GTFF union will amount to about…

I had to miss Friday’s bargaining session, but it seems the administration finally responded to the GTFF’s economic proposal by repeating their previous proposal, throwing in an additional 0.5% per year to make it an even 1%. I know a few economists, and they tell me the western US consumer price index increased by 3.1 % last year, so as might have been predicted this did not go over well.

Likewise, while the administration’s proposal to move some of what it pays for GTFF health care (by all reports it’s a cadillac plan that puts PEBB to shame, although the GTFF did manage to cut what UO paid for it last year) and put it in salary, while optimal to a rational expected-income maximizing risk-neutral agent, is not so optimal under the assumption of utility-maximization and the resulting risk aversion that has been the working model of economists since before there were such things as economists (Bernoulli, 1738). Yes, I know that newer models of loss aversion from psychologists and behavioral economists make this result stronger, but they are not needed to predict the response here.

The messages from the GTFF and the administration are below the break.