Firstly, we want everyone to be aware of the fact that the University has told administration not to speak to any of us about the bargaining process. They realize that these changes impact the ability of grad directors and others to recruit new graduate students and has very real impacts on the students they work with on a daily basis. Our interests as faculty and graduate students are aligned. We want to be productive members of our department, we teach the same students, and we work together on departmental committees. Yet the University feels that our supervisors shouldn't know about the changes that will impact their students. All the more reason for us to have conversations with our supervisors about these changes.
Secondly, we've been negotiating a number of things with the University. We have come to some understanding on a few issues, like jury duty, medical leave, anti-harassment language, and parental leave. We talk about many issues each meeting, bringing up concerns and questions for language and going back and making modifications to the language for the next meeting.
Some things that came up in yesterday's meeting:
1) we want to remove departmental fees and other fees incurred by international students and which are required. The University doesn't want to entertain this, so we have tabled it to bring up again. None of us get paid enough to pay those fees to the University. Not all of us have fees, but for those who do, it can be a full paycheck!
2) the University is spending valuable time at the bargaining table changing the language in our contract to call our wage a stipend instead of a salary. The language is currently interchangeable and they want to make stipend the only language used, striking the language that makes it interchangeable. Now, there are a number of reasons why we think they are doing this, but there are also a lot of consequences. Some peoples financial aid would change if they didn't have a salary, some international students would have issues with visas, and generally there are a lot of governmental hoops that many of our colleagues must jump thru, that receiving a stipend instead of a salary would make much harder or impossible. A small issue, but one that could have giant implications for many members.
3) MSU thinks that active shooter training and mandatory reporting are worth their monetary resources to provide to us, but will not entertain either mental health or CPR training, even as a reimbursement for voluntary training. Mental and physical first aid would help prevent the need for active shooter training and would better ready us to be mandatory reporters. But the University says that being able to deal with students physical and emotional interests are not part of our jobs, and are not in the fiscal interest of MSU.
4) MSU is afraid that we will abuse reduced meal plans because, by their own admission, the administrators who use it pay for their friends and their children, and they are afraid that at 6$ a meal, they will lose money feeding us. None of us can afford the relatively crappy (also admitted by the University) meals at the $9 rate, but considering our long hours, we would eat there if we could afford it. They aren't losing money because we rarely eat there now, but would gain money from us because we would start to eat there. If there is any margin of profit on $6, they will make money on this choice. They are reluctant to consider this.
5) they still haven't given us a monetary value for our salary for the next 4 years. This was due to us by April 1st, but they still haven't provided it to us. They made mention that there was only so much pie to go around, and we asked if this was why they weren't interested in mental health first aid - because it cost them money - and they said no.
6) We are pushing them to discuss merit pay, as they said they won't give us a number for wages until we discuss merit pay. We provided 14 reasons why merit pay is completely untenable to us, to our faculty supervisors, and to the undergraduates who's educations' both us and MSU should value. We will post those reasons in another post, so stay tuned.
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