February 16 2007 2.30 PM to 5 PM

The third bargaining session between GEO and the University saw some progress in clarifying issues around the proposals we presented (for Articles 1, 3, 10 and 15) but was ultimately inconclusive on all of them. The University also indicated that it does not have any more proposals forthcoming in the near future.

Article 1: On the issue of including all graduate student employees working in GEO-eligible or comparable positions at UMass Amherst in our bargaining unit regardless of their source of income – specifically as a result of a program where UMass Amherst grad employees are being paid on UMass Dartmouth paychecks and are therefore not able to get GEO benefits – the University said it would seek clarification about the specific programs where this was an issue.

Article 3: On the issue of incorporating MOU 13 into the article (regarding the procedure for processing GEO dues deduction forms) the university asked for an assurance that the procedure would be arbitrable in case either party did not fulfill its responsibility. We agreed to make changes that would include such an assurance.

Article 10: On the issue of GEO’s access to the new bulletin boards in the Campus Center – Student Union corridor and to our status as a campus organization to reserve space in the campus center for meetings, the university indicated it needed more information from the Center for Student Development regarding its policies, and from other campus unions regarding their access to the Campus Center for booking space.

Article 15: On the issue of including ‘ethnicity’ as a category in the article on non-discrimination, the university wanted a universal definition of ethnicity and a reason why it should be included. In the course of a long and rambling discussion on the meaning of ethnicity, we pointed out that whatever ethnicity may mean it was certainly not covered by the existing language of the article; and also that the definitions of other categories in the article (race, sex, language, national origin, etc.) were equally indeterminate. The university asked for more examples of language from comparable contracts which we agreed to provide.

We then presented our language on Article 22 (workload) where our proposed changes were:

• that every graduate student must be contracted to work for at least 380 hours in an academic year (from one appointment or from a combination of appointments),

• that Teaching Associates (TOs) must be employed for at least 20 hours per week for every 3-credit course, and

• that TOs should approve any changes in the enrollment caps in the courses that they teach.

The university’s team, after a brief caucus rejected our first two changes and asked for more time to clarify the procedure on enrollment cap changes before their final response.

Finally on Article 44, which the university had proposed to change so that grad student employees would have to work for at least 4 consecutive months before they were eligible for unpaid leave, we had pointed out that this would imply that no employee would be eligible to take any leave in the Fall semester. We also presented alternative language that allowed grad employees who had been employed for at least 8 pay periods in the last 12 months to be eligible for unpaid leave. The university summarily rejected this language.

The only other substantive proposal from the University in the previous session was to cut funding for GEO staff positions from 4 (four) to 1 (one) (Article 4) and to increase the limit on health insurance co-payments (Article 35).

Article 4:
On the question of GEO staff positions funded by the University, the University’s team had argued that such funding was disproportionately high when compared to other unions on campus, such as the Massachusetts Society of Professors (MSP). We argued that the actual dollars the University allocates towards GEO staff positions is substantially lower than it’s expenditure on MSP, given the fact that GEO is also a significantly larger union in terms of our membership. We also presented comparative wage figures to show that – both in absolute and in relative terms – the University spends less on our staff positions than on similar positions for MSP.

The University’s response was first to argue that a graduate student Full Time Employee (FTE) is not comparable to a professor’s FTE: a specious and irrelevant argument. Their second response was to ask for information regarding our Local union’s finances: information that is both publicly available and also completely irrelevant. Finally the University requested information on GEO’s annual income from membership dues and agency fees: again we pointed out that this information is both publicly available and is actually given to us every year by the university itself. The issue remained inconclusive pending the university’s access to its own information.

On Article 35 (healthcare co-pays) we indicated that we would present our response in the next session, scheduled for Friday March 2 at 1.30 PM.

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