Stormy weather ahead...

Atmospherics today were relatively good, maybe the nice weather or the fact it was their lead negotiator’s birthday (since we negotiate in his building he even offered us leftover cake from an earlier workplace celebration), or maybe it was because we only discussed a few minor issues. But stormy weather lies ahead. I am excited and worried, because we are moving to the high stakes controversial stuff like our right to strike, wages, discipline procedures, review procedures, and job security.

Today there was not too much to talk about. We gave them a copy of a half finished counter proposal on grievances. They gave us a completed counter on supplies and equipment, a topic on which we’ve spent WAY too much time in my opinion. Let's focus on the grievance issues, since this is a key part of our contract:

Grievances: Alex our lead negotiator today explained key aspects of our half finished counter proposal. Essentially, the union wants to own the grievance procedure and specifically the right to file a grievance on behalf of an individual even if the individual does not sign the grievance. Essentially, we want a low barrier for filing a grievance and a high barrier for halting this process, administration wants the reverse. Besides that, we want a longer time period to file a grievance, whereas they want a very short time window (e.g. something bad happens to employee, employee must initiate the grievance process within 10 days of that, problem is, often you're not immediately aware something happened, or you are not able to meet your Chair within 10 days because of scheduling problems).

Regarding who "owns" the grievance (employee or union), I’m still not sure about all the issues here. Obviously if a member has to sign a grievance, intimidation factors may work against this. Administration’s concern is that such matters are often best resolved informally and grievances will escalate matters, an example was cited of an employee who really did not want to be at a grievance (this was another MSU union I presume) who started crying. We explained the union would be reasonable in these matters. So hopefully all sides can work something out. Commonsense tells me that if a member does not want their issue trapped in a high stakes, high visibility grievance procedure, then how would the union even know about this issue? It’s true there could be a widespread problem the union wants to file a grievance about and that I the meek employee might not want to be involved in that and might have to testify. But isn’t the whole point of the union so that I have a means of redressing problems in the workplace rather than meekly accepting them out of fear?

I did not have time to review their counter on supplies, they said it had 4 bullet points that essentially dove tailed with our proposal. All I can say is that it is ridiculous that the administration is fighting over the wording of simple things like access to buildings and mailboxes, I need to sit down and see if in this latest proposal they have stopped being so recalcitrant.

For Thursday: I suppose they will respond to our grievance counter proposal. Oops, just got an email from Alex (UNTF staff) that we have to meet on Wednesday to work on some more stuff, so I guess more stuff will be discussed.