communications

EC Meeting Agenda 11/13/18

Facilitator: Clint Mattox
Vibes Watcher:Kali Doten
Time Keeper: Nick Fisher
Notetaker: Emory Colvin

Attendance: Emory Colvin, Clint Mattox, Nick Fisher, Erin Abernethy, Micknai Arefaine, Alex Riccio, Kali Doten, Lzz Johnk, Okan Agirseven, Paris Kalathas
Meeting began: 5:03
Ice-breaker: Best, or worse, Harry Potter film? (Or why you won’t watch the movies).

  • Slack Approvals (1 Minute)
        • AME on 11/1
        • We approved a review instead of an audit, saving us roughly $3k.
        • CGE Newsletter as AME on 11/6
        • Approved creation of a monthly CGE newsletter
        • Appointment of Nicholas Fisher as our first ever VP of Membership!
        • Approved endorsement of Heather Mae for the Carbon Committee and Allison Daniel for the Transportation Committee.
        • New website is approved and will be live soon! Check it out: cge6069.org
        • For next meeting: approve past minutes for posting.
  • Steward Approvals (1 Minute)
        • Interim steward appointments of Adam Bouché, Clayton Sodergren, and Linda Tucker Serniak.
        • Creation of Hardship Fund Committee ran by stewards.
        • Creation of Retirement Benefits Committee.
        • Creation of Caucus on Graduate Employee Safety.
        • Creation of International Graduate Student Caucus.
  • Review of Things to be approved: (1 Minute)
        • Exit Interview or Opt-Out Form for Membership Cancellation
        • Switch to Comcast
        • AME “In Solidarity With Trans Communities”
        • Review quorum & +1 approval protocol via Slack or email
            • 5 people for quorum.
            • Do we want a minimum time for people to review things before sending/acting?
        • Use text as a backup for really urgent things to tell someone to check Slack (just don’t use group texts or emojis for anyone if you don’t know if they have a smart phone).
        • Scheduling an internal membership audit
  • Newsletter Items: (Add as we go)
      • Move upcoming events to the top.
      • Include a member spotlight (profile/interview with a member) each newsletter (approved).
        • Micknai: Slack channel or Google doc to come up with questions.
      • Decisions made by EC and SC this past week (including today’s meeting)
      • Steward Elections in winter, open nominations
      • Convention Delegate elections, open nominations
      • Grievance 101 Workshop
      • Grievance victories? (Idea from GTFF 40th Anniversary)
        • Alex and Emory: put summaries together.
      • Membership totals (currently at 1,112 out of 1,864= 60%)
      • New Website
      • MOI Deadline (Nov. 26)
    • Caucus Meetings
        • Nov. 14, 4pm WestM: International Graduate Caucus
        • (TBD) Nov. 16, 12pm or Nov. 20, 2pm: Pride Caucus  
        • Nov. 20, 6pm WestM: Housing Caucus
        • Nov. 21, 4pm WestM: Anti-Bullying Caucus

Within Two Weeks

  • Grievance Workshop 101 (Nov. 15)
  • FYI Sessions are either 12-2 or 3-5 in McClean Room. Alex and Dan Anderson from AFT-OR will be facilitating the workshops. Beneficial for anyone wishing to understand grievances and strategies for filing grievances better.
  • Movie Night (Nov. 15)
  • FYI 6pm at WestM, someone will need to show Alex how to clean and operate the popcorn machine if we plan to use that (otherwise we have a box of bagged popcorn that will work fine).
        • Erin knows how to do this and will be here for the last grievance workshop.
      • Alex: buy popcorn supplies.
  • Review (instead of audit) due Nov. 15
  • FYI Clint and Alex will have documents ready by the 15th and the review instead of an audit will save us roughly $3k.
  • Caucus Meetings
  • International Grad Caucus (Nov. 14, 4pm)
  • Housing Caucus: (Nov. 20, 6pm)
        • Discuss support for AFT-OR initiative. Could be a good way to get folks from this caucus more involved.
  • Anti-bullying Caucus (Nov. 21, 4pm)
  • Pride Caucus: (Nov. 20, 2pm)
      • Others are pending. Concern that working parents won’t have time for a caucus.
  • Ed Ray Meeting (Nov. 16, 10am 4pm)
      • Who is able to attend? Kali and Clint.
      • Have the following potential topics for the agenda:
          • Poor quality buildings (particularly Graf); why aren’t there building managers for every building like our contract says there should be?
          • Fellows transitioning to GAs have gap in health insurance, why not sync up enrollment periods and make this easier? And make sure it’s being clearly communicated (both gap in getting paid and issues with insurance).
          • Sexual Harassment workshops and CBA mandatory training for all supervisors (how can supervisors be expected to do their job if they don’t receive the proper training?)
            • Emory and Kali will touch base on this.
          • OSU should make information about CGE more public, as it only helps them to recruit graduate students.
          • Gender neutral restrooms.
  • Steward Departmental Meeting
        • Botany & Plant Pathology will have a department meeting about CGE at Westminster on Nov. 19 between 10-2 hosted by Katarina and Nick Carleson.
        • Materials Science Nov. 26.
  • Meeting w/ Provost Ed Feser
  • Nov. 20 3-3:45pm
        • Micknai saw Mohammad and is going to follow up by phone. Doesn’t necessarily need anyone else to attend, but wants to strategize.
        • About a scholarship that they got rid of.
  • Staff Off Week
    • Alex has accumulated additional hours and has asked to take Nov. 26-28 off (22nd and 23rd are already paid holidays, so this would mean Alex would be gone from the 22-28)
      • Approved!

Further Down the Road

  • SEIU Holiday Party (Dec. 6)
  • Steward Elections
  • Winter Steward Meetings: Likely Thursdays from 5-7pm will be our winter meeting times again based on poll results so far.
  • AFT-OR Convention Delegate Elections
      • Screen print shirts with other grad locals?
  • Internal Membership Audit:
      • Once we get our November deductions from OSU Payroll, we should organize a work party where we literally just check every person on the list and see if we have a card for them and if it matches our records. Needed for two reasons: 1) to ensure nothing was missed during the transition period while we have not had a part-time staff person; and 2) our internal membership audit last year was only an audit of cards where our records said they were a member. A better audit would have check every person in the BU to see if we had a card for them.
    • Need to schedule a date, just sometime before winter break. This can be done over the course of a few days too, and would likely only require an hour of your time if enough people pitch in.

Longer Discussion

  • AFT-OR Housing Working Group
        • This group is tasked with implementing the resolution on Housing Cooperatives that CGE wrote up for last year’s convention.
        • Resolution calls for partnerships with non-profit cooperative groups
        • Also calls for establishment of $25k to help members that wish to start a housing coop.
        • GTFF says that David Rives wants to gut the initiative due to low participation.
          • Sounds like Lola is interested but working on trying to get more folks interested in this. GTFF has an article up in their current bargaining round.
        • Erin has call with Devin (AFT) on Wednesday; hoping to give him contacts of interested CGE folks
  • AFT-OR Executive Council
      • Apparently local 111 has stopped paying their percaps, and Michelle Catena no longer attends EC meetings for AFT-OR. This could potentially mean that we have an opening on the EC (and maybe another one soon if Kris O. steps down). Hazel has expressed interest in filling the role. We need to find out the details about this.
  • Exit Interview or Opt-Out Form for Membership Cancellation
      • Alex has worked on a potential form we might consider using. (Will have print out for meeting)
  • Switch to Comcast
          • Standard Package would be $130 a month (saving us roughly $40 a month) with a one-time installation fee of $130. We would be locked into a 3-year agreement. Beyond the savings, we would have much faster and superior internet service than our current office service, and likely much better WiFi access too.
          • We would need to approve this change before the 21st.
          • Alex: find out the fee for canceling CenturyLink. Does Comcast have the ability to change the price within that 3 years? Do they assign us a rep? Find out about wifi coverage (upstairs & downstairs).
    • Going live with new website (pending url access)
        • A member brought forward an idea about hosting a weekly chatroom where grads can ask questions anonymously and receive answers, and the feeling was that this could be one way to help get people to talk to us about bullying happening on the job without fear of retaliation and the ability to be anonymous.
            • Would need a person to monitor the chat every week and be accountable to it, and some promotion of it as something we do.
            • Or, we could simply setup a forum where we solicit such anonymous comments and could reply to them as they come. But this would look more like our current Housing Forum.
            • Have a way to moderate/close out topics. Require moderation before posts.
            • Or a pop-up notification to officers for when a question is posted.
          • Alex: Ask the anti-bullying caucus what would be a good approach for their needs.
          • Possibly look into creating an app?
          • Alex: post about ‘new website coming’.
          • Find out from Brian: who is hosting the new website if it’s not going to be on Peak?
            • We definitely need to hold on to cge6069.org so that no one can buy it and pretend to be us – might as well have it forward if we’re going to have it.
            • One benefit to changing the url would be getting around the fact that a lot of the email addresses have been flagged as spam.
            • Email addresses through comcast?
  • Promote Grievance Victories?
        • GTFF used to keep grievances posted on their office window and change their colors according to whether they won the grievance or not. They kept things anonymous, but this was also a way for union members to understand why their union was important and how they could win improvements in the workplace.
      • Could be something we incorporate into our newsletter? Just a short, respectful of privacy, statement that we won a grievance with this outcome sort of thing? And even list the number of pending grievances that we have?
        • See notes above in newsletter section.
  • Bargaining Recruitment and Campaign
      • GTFF is bargaining with a 25-person team! They set their ground rules this term and will have a schedule of sessions soon. Good idea for us to visit a session or two (primarily thinking Erin and Alex) to help inform our ideas for starting some bargaining momentum here.
      • Winter term should be when we start generating momentum for our next bargaining round. This document has been created to start highlighting areas for improvement in our CBA and additional items to bargain over.
      • Alex feels it would be a good idea to host some sort of introductory session about bargaining in winter to start trying to recruit people to our bargaining team, and then potentially in spring we could do a whole workshop on how bargaining works, what a team needs to think about during bargaining, etc.
  • 20th Anniversary Party?
      • Seems like something that really helped propel GTFF’s bargaining was their ability to kick-off bargaining with their 40th Anniversary Party.
      • CGE was recognized formally as a union in 1999 (I believe), which means our 20th year anniversary could be celebrated next year.
      • Perhaps over the winter break we can start envisioning how we might put on a celebration and use it as an opportunity to build some bargaining momentum?
  • AFT Connect Database
      • AFT is launching a new database that will synthesize all sorts of data (such as Hustle, email responses, etc). We already send our member lists to Aft but it’s through a terrible system that is being retired. We will need to use connect starting January for updating our lists with national, but we can also opt to use Connect exclusively and stop using Knack (since Connect will offer all the same things).
      • Alex spoke with Ben from AFT about this, and it seems like moving to Connect would actually reduce the amount of redundant things we currently do with data management and get everything in one place. We would also not have to pay for Knack anymore, which would save us a few hundred bucks a year.
  • Look into re-branding
    • Move away from OSU colors (both to differentiate ourselves and to move away from the history of orange in relation to OSU).

Things To Keep On Our Radar

  • Longevity Committee
  • Met on Nov. 6 and continued conversation about redesigning the part-time CGE staff position. Working title for this position is Part Time Accountant and Organizer (is this what we said?)
      • Meeting again on Nov. 20 to finalize changes to CCGEE contract and submit for EC approval at the next meeting.
  • Financial Committee Discussions
      • Discussions on possibly getting a credit card for CGE
      • Investment options for our reserves
  • Executive Council role with Caucuses
        • Currently, our External Relations Chair has had one primary task in scheduling Ed Ray meetings and has other responsibilities that are less structured (excluding LBLCLC meetings). Considering the development of caucuses and trying to ensure that they are kept in the center of organizing activities, it seems like our Executive Council could make the External Relations Chair more focused on nurturing the development of caucuses. They could do this with the assistance of our Social Justice Chair and the VP of Organizing and VP of Membership can be secondary point people. Since both the External Relations Chair and Social Justice Chair have more open role descriptions, this could be a way of making these roles more concrete for future Exec Councils.
      • What do folks think?
  • Workers Unite Debrief
        • What could have been improved?
          • Attendance. Didn’t get many from SEIU.
        • What went well?
          • Screen printing went well (most popular).
        • Pack the UAOSU bargaining sessions to show solidarity, help to sustain them through bargaining in fun ways.
          • Tomorrow is ground rules.
          • Do we want to do something next term if we don’t get a lot of interest from the other two unions? Maybe at least wait until after the faculty are organized.
          • How do we follow-up?
            • Bring them into the Solidarity Fair in May.
  • Steward Retreat and Steward Council Meeting Debrief
      • What could have improved?
      • What went well?
      • How do we follow-up?
  • Constitutional Convention Debrief
      • What could have improved?
      • What went well?
      • Do we need to follow-up?
  • GTFF 40th anniversary debrief?
      • Potential collaborations leading up to convention
      • Or an all-year-long thing.
          • Good kickoff for bargaining, get people pumped up in addition to bargaining strategies
          • Is it too early to think about CGE 20th anniversary?
          • Form a committee!

Adjourned: 6:53

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