One members recap of Thursday March 25 bargaining session

Today felt to me as one of the more positive sessions we've had. Both sides seemed to actually dialogue and respond to each other on some points and said they "heard" (even if did not necessarily agree with) the other side's perspective on a few things. I don't think any tentative agreements were reached today though. A partial summary follows hopefully other folks who were there can chime in.

KEY THING I noticed (somebody else pointed this out): their level of willingness to hear us out and dialogue with us seems correlated to the presence of UNTF observers in the room, there were 2 such folks today. So it is crucial that different UNTF members come to at least 1 bargaining session; the ones who come always find it interesting and you don't have to say anything, just sit quietly in the back row (you can even be like your students and slyly read your State News during the boring parts...).

Discipline section: frank exchange on what a process for discipline should look like. Our proposal describes a 3 step process, they seem to want a more informal process which of course would leave the union out of the loop.

Grievances: they still really seem to want the union member to sign a grievance but conceded the union does own the grievance. One of their team expressed the concern about having an "out" for a member who REALLY does not want a grievance filed on their behalf. We responded with our concern that out of fear and powerlessness a member may be afraid to press a grievance but does that mean they don't want to? Other people who were there may wish to clarify my explanation of this.

Health and safety: they had given us a counter proposal deleting major portions of ours: our request for some kind of process to ensure employees know the basic MSU resources re: these issues. They repeated their view that health/safety issues vary by unit and that maybe we should develop these in an ongoing conversation with the administration outside the contract. Seems to be a misunderstanding on their part about what we are asking for: we are not asking to develop detailed instructions re: classroom violence etc. we are just asking that MSU (either centrally or via its colleges or units) commit to ensuring employees know some basics and where to go for help and information.

The psychology of the taboo trade-off: Surprising insights into sacred values, and what they mean for negotiation.

This intriguing Scientific American article argues certain things (your lucky beer mug, "right to choose", "right to life", whatever) have a special sacred meaning to people, and that negotiating about these can be very tricky. I'm skeptical about reductionistic pop psychology, but I wonder if this perhaps explains the MSU administration's seemingly irrational, rigid position on a variety of small issues (no bulletin boards for example): maybe they represent a bigger sacred something to them. If we could figure out what this is maybe we'd have a better handle on how to negotiate with them. (Of course, the converse is also probably true).

"What truly distinguishes sacred values from secular ones is how people behave when asked to compromise them. When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a “taboo tradeoff”—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange....A more successful tack for negotiating over sacred values, as it turns out, is to simply use the right words. ...using specific rhetorical strategies can make trade-offs seem less taboo and can facilitate conflict resolution." http://bit.ly/9vGnNn

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.

Not quite time for Kumbaya (Bargaining on 3/15)

This last Monday’s bargaining session is not what you would call radical or highly successful, but for me it represented a shift in thinking about our bargaining experience. Even though we did reach a tentative agreement on medical disputes and came close to a couple of others, for me, the progress was in the interactions between the union and the administration. More than once we had discussions about the issues, what we were attempting to achieve with our language and what the administration was attempting with theirs. We did not sit around and sing Kumbaya together, but I think it did foster some indication that we are all interested in helping to strengthen the university.

It strengthen was during one of these explanations of viewpoint that I realized one of the difficulties we are wrestling with at the table is with the level of organization. Anyone who has been at MSU long can tell you that it has a very strong decentralized approach to many of its academic policies. This approach allows departments to have a lot of freedom for how they approach education, which can be a good thing. However, this approach has allowed for some departments to exploit non-tenure track faculty. Many of the things the union is asking for is a centralizing and standardizing of some academic policies, which may go against MSU’s institutional “grain”.

So, I guess the epiphany for me this week was that institutional structure may be one of the bigger hurdles we have to overcome to reach our goals for this contract…and it isn’t just a greedy, power-hungry administration trying to keep the little guy down (I think).

--A Bargain

From the Table 3/11

At the table today, March 11, 2010, Penny Gardner, Bargaining Committee reporting!

Sometimes I am a Rachel Madow wannabe..

Anyway, at the negotiating table today, we made progress through testy moments provided by those across the table from the UNTF bargaining committee. Proposals and counter proposals were presented by both sides, and hallelujah even three tentative agreements were signed. It is a chipping away process to come to agreement and our chief negotiator keeps strong presence in light of hostility and negativity that erupts from the other side. The last thing today was our words "without penalty" in the medical dispute section being replaced by them with the words "without termination" counter proposed by us with the words "without discipline" countered by them, "without discipline and/or discharge". We agreed. Of course there was much more to this than meets the eye, but I couldn't resist sharing this little moment of progress....

Come join us. There is lots to learn. Contact us to sign-up and be caught up! Penny

Membership Meeting @ Dublin Square March 18th, 5:30-8:00pm

Hi Everyone,

We'll be sending out emails and putting some flyers in folks mailboxes about this event, too. It is a great opportunity to talk directly to the bargaining team and have your voice heard as to the progress of contract negotiations.

We are going to have some hot apps for people to snack on, and of course, access to Dublin Square's excellent selection of on tap brew, and Scotch and Irish Whiskeys.

See You There!!!

Thusday March 18th, 5:30-8:00pm, in the Event Room at Dublin Square.

Thoughts from an Observer

I was mostly aware of the energy flows in the room. It was interesting to observe the ritual of gauging the opposing side by
their demeanor, their tone of voice, eye contact, sense of humor, and ability to articulate points in a logically convincing way. On one level, it seemed there was a lot of straight forward stuff, given that there are precedents for many of the contract points discussed, so that the process became more of a reasonable exchange (compromise) on both parts to arrive at the middle, where some things may be granted and others withheld given the particular atmosphere in the room that day. By that I mean that, everything else being equal (the precedent of other contracts), our presence in the room or the perception of it by management may tip the scale. So, while some things did seem more difficult to pass and were deferred, others seemed to respond more easily to the atmosphere and presence that we may have in the room either as articulate, intelligent, and able to counter back arguments or as an incompetent and easily tricked bunch of people. Alyssa--our lead negotiator--seems to handle them (and their egos) beautifully. So, it seems that, at least on one level, management?s perception of a strong will (ours) and controlled egos (ours) does play a role in our favor.