Our GTFF Bargaining Team is excited to announce our collective bargaining platform: handcrafted based on our bargaining survey results and member feedback at town halls.
Our platform “One Flock, One Fight” has been developed in line with a Bargaining for the Common Good approach. Inspired by education workers across the country, we are fighting for a contract that looks out for every graduate employee (GE) and benefits not only us, but the members of our community who fill our lives in and outside of the workplace! Our members and community are facing countless crises on a daily basis, and this platform intends to challenge the status quo of labor unionism. Our struggle is not to simply improve our working conditions, but to utilize our union as a medium through which to achieve structural, lasting social, political, and economic change.
Here are our main demands:
ACADEMIC FREEDOM
Our union will fight to establish strong and reliable academic freedom and free speech standards in our contract in order to protect the essential contributions we make to our field as researchers and educators. This will protect our GEs from censorship and retaliation, whether as experts in our field or employees at the University of Oregon.
INSURANCE
We will protect our health insurance by maintaining the structure of our Health and Welfare Trust, which determines the scope and affordability of our benefits, and demanding that our insurance remain affordable despite national price increases in coverage.
WORKPLACE HEALTH AND SAFETY
We will improve health regulations and standards in university buildings where we perform our research and academic work. This will include regulations of air and water quality, physical accessibility of the buildings, parking subsidies, and ensuring that university police are not used to regulate protected labor activity on campus.
FINANCIAL SECURITY
We will maintain financial security throughout the school year and summer term by (1) increasing GE salaries in accordance with local cost of living increases and (2) expanding qualifying circumstances for our Graduate Assistance Fund. This will also include strengthening GE appointment guidelines and layoff protections.
RESEARCH ASSISTANT SUPPORT
Our bargaining team will elaborate the boundary between GE and student work for research GEs, who are at particular risk for overwork given the unique overlap of their academic and paid labor. We will also ensure that these GEs have access to paid leave.
CAREGIVER AND INTERNATIONAL GE SUPPORT
Our contract will also expand protections resources for caregivers and non-citizen workers. For caregivers, we will expand qualifying events for caregivers to apply to the Graduate Assistance Fund and maintain access to subsidized childcare over the summer term. We will also demand that UO (1) codify itself as a sanctuary campus and (2) establish a Graduate Student Accounting and Legal Assistance Fund, available to all international graduate students regardless of GE status, that provides necessary support for tax- and immigration-related issues in order to maintain their status in their graduate programs.
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