Well, what can you say happens when nothing happens?
It was the UO’s turn to put their first proposals on the table, which they promised to do and we were very excited to see, but then they didn’t. Without much in the way of explanation, they informed us that they were not ready to propose economic articles and they weren’t quite ready to make proposals on their other non-economic proposals.
The did respond to a couple of our proposals and tentatively advance one proposal of their own – a proposal which they quickly backed away from.
I think the second biggest disappointment of the day was their failure to say anything substantive about our proposal in Article 10 concerning GTF office conditions. Our proposal would set up a fund to help improve office conditions. There would be a committee made up of UO and GTFF members to investigate the conditions and allocate money on an annual basis.
We expected some pushback on the amount of money, the structure of the committee and/or the need for it. What we did not expect was the UO to object that we were not filing enough grievances over office conditions to warrant them considering such a fund.
As you may imagine, the grievance process is time consuming and inherently confrontational. Many GTFs know that they are working in subpar office conditions but don’t want to raise the issue at the departmental level for fear of retribution and/or the knowledge that the department doesn’t have the money to fix the problems. We were hoping to get around these problems with this committee.
Unfortunately, the UO seems to prefer delay and confrontation.
You should also take a look at their proposal on the summer sandwich tuition waiver. Basically, they would be limiting the classes a grad with a summer sandwich tuition waiver to whichever classes the grad school/department/college thought were appropriate. Under questioning the UO readily admitted it was not a well-thought out proposal, so we don’t really know how tightly they’ll stick with it.
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