Upcoming Sessions & Bargaining Debriefs

Coming soon!

Coming soon!

What did UO offer?

While UO has failed to respond to more than 10 article proposals, your lead negotiator pressed them to elaborate on some of the proposals they have offered.

• Article 17: Appointment and Reappointment — Despite previously claiming that they would clarify how their proposal impacts undergraduate student workers, UO was unprepared to answer questions about the article.
• Article 16: Discipline and Discharge — UO claims that most of their proposed changes are cosmetic rather than substantive, and wouldn’t actually change how the disciplinary process occurs.
• Article 22: Salary — Though UO said that a 0% raise would probably be “frustrating” for GEs, they are in fact proposing to delete the entire raise section of your contract. When your bargaining team asked UO’s team if GEs currently make a living wage, UO’s lead negotiator replied, “Um…I’m not going to speak to that.”
• Article 13: Grievances — UO is proposing expansions to the amount of time they have to respond to a grievance raised by a GE.
• Article 30: Graduate Assistance Fund — UO claimed that their intention is not to remove graduate student representation on the Graduate Assistance Fund committee, but to restructure the committee as a whole.
• Article 33: Library Privileges — UO is proposing deleting this entire article, which deals with library carrels, from the contract due to irrelevance. Your bargaining team responded by pressing them on how they will ensure that GEs retain access to library spaces and resources.
• Article 4: Dues Deductions — This article details the process where UO deducts our GTFF dues from our paychecks and transfers those funds to GTFF leadership. This is a process UO struggles to correctly follow. Their proposal rejected language requiring them to pay interest on funds that they withhold and fail to transfer to GTFF on time.
• Article 3: Union Rights — In response to their budget crisis, UO is looking to offload labor from paid staff to unpaid GEs, by removing union GE releases and decreasing their responsibilities for onboarding and orientation.
• Article 23: Tuition Waivers — UO didn’t seem to fully understand how their proposal to restrict tuition waivers to mandatory coursework would impact GEs. While they claimed that they don’t want to change the article’s meaning, your bargaining team expressed concern that this restriction could create logistical issues for GEs taking music classes and language classes, GEs pursuing graduate certificates, and GEs already navigating authorization processes for coursework.
• Article 24: Health Insurance — UO’s proposal would mean doubled healthcare costs for GEs, while decreasing their own financial responsibility.
• Article 26: Caregivers — UO rejected your bargaining team’s proposal to increase childcare assistance eligibility from $1,000 to $2,000.
• Article 29: Paid and Unpaid Absences — UO proposed a shift from sick hours to sick days for GEs.
• Article 45: Term of Agreement — UO’s proposed five-year contract allows them to avoid having to do “a lot of work” to negotiate more frequently—coincidentally, it also keeps GEs from being able to address issues like health insurance or the Graduate Assistance Fund without UO’s permission to negotiate.

If you want to keep up with your bargaining team’s proposals, UO’s proposals, and the current contract language, check out our Bargaining Tracker.

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During a brief caucus, we heard from GEs across the university about your thoughts on salary and healthcare. Although the nuances of individual comments differed, one position was consistent: UO’s proposal of 0% raises over 5 years is unacceptable.

Many GEs expressed that salary and healthcare are impossible to consider separately from one another, and several GEs specifically suggested wanting to find a solution that balances a smaller raise with more affordable health insurance. Your bargaining team will be taking all of these comments into account as they continue to strategize how to approach this issue at the table.

Do you have thoughts on the topics of healthcare and salary? 
Submit them to the bargaining team here!

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How did GTFF respond to UO’s offers?

Your bargaining team passed three counter-proposals back to UO:

• Article 25: Respectful Workplace — Your bargaining team is continuing to fight to change the definition of bullying so that it doesn’t need to be “intentional” to be grievable, because nobody should get away with creating a hostile work environment by simply claiming that they didn’t mean to. Your bargaining team also made some movement by proposing to maintain the status quo of five GE positions in the Division of Graduate Studies, after UO proposed slashing all but one of these positions.
• Article 4: Dues Deductions — Your bargaining team accepted proposals to expand the timeline of the deductions process to make it more realistic, but reaffirmed that UO should pay interest on money that they owe us.
• Article 16: Discipline and Discharge — After UO proposed changing definitions so that a written warning wouldn’t count as discipline, your bargaining team reaffirmed that written warnings should not only be part of the disciplinary process, but that they should be a mandatory way to communicate warnings. Requiring supervisors to communicate discipline in writing empowers you and your fellow GEs to more easily document evidence if you need to file a grievance. Your bargaining team also affirmed their positions that UO should make extensive efforts to contact GEs before considering a position abandoned and that if a supervisor fails to communicate to a GE that you have Weingarten Rights, you should be able to file a grievance. (P.S. What are Weingarten Rights anyway?)

What did UO offer?

While your bargaining team specifically requested that UO to bring us offers on Article 35: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Article 27: Support for Non-Citizen GEs, Article 19: Summer Term, and Article 21: Layoffs, they arrived to Wednesday’s bargaining session mostly empty-handed. Here’s what UO proposed:

• Article 27: Support for Non-Citizen GEs — Because of the tumultuous legal and political landscape that non-citizen GEs must navigate, your bargaining team prioritized pushing UO to respond to our proposals for expanded support for international and non-citizen GEs. However, UO had nothing prepared in response to what your bargaining team proposed.
• Article 35: Immigration and Customs Enforcement — In March, your bargaining team proposed expanded restrictions on how ICE (and other immigration enforcement officers) can enter our workplace. On Wednesday, over 4 months later, UO’s response was to ask your bargaining team to rewrite GTFF’s proposal, rather than countering with UO’s own. Again, UO showed up to the table unprepared to engage with your bargaining team’s contract proposals.
• Article 19: Summer Term — While your bargaining team proposed several solutions meant to address shortages of summer GE positions and support GEs whose classes are canceled, UO re-proposed current contract language (status quo). They did not show up to the table with any proposals of their own.
• Article 21: Layoff — UO also proposed status quo language for this article, meaning that they showed up with no new proposals and no engagement with what your bargaining team proposed to protect our job security.
• Article 9: Work Agreement/Work Assignment — UO again proposed status quo language, and did not engage with your bargaining team’s proposals to expand transparency and clarity around GE responsibilities and GE assignments.
• Article 39: Printing and Distribution of the Contract — UO’s team proposed eliminating language that requires them to print copies of our contract. Your lead negotiator reminded them that they have not responded to Article 10: Health, Safety, and Work Environment, where your bargaining team asked them to guarantee wifi access on campus. While UO’s team has stated that they feel that printing the contract is redundant when it could be accessed online, a digital copy is not necessarily useful if we aren’t able to access the internet at work.
• Article 15: Arbitration — Though Chris Meade, UO’s lead negotiator, initially did not recognize his own proposal being projected onscreen in the room, he did eventually explain that UO’s team doesn’t see discrimination and harassment as contract issues, but as HR issues. Your lead negotiator expressed disagreement, noting that we have an entire article in our contract addressing discrimination and harassment.
• Article 16: Discipline and Discharge — UO did not make any movement on their previous proposal.
• Article 25: Respectful Workplace — UO also did not make any movement on their previous proposal.
• Article 28: Expense Reimbursement — UO proposed current contract language, not addressing concerns about delayed reimbursement for work expenses.

TL;DR: UO continues to stall, propose status quo language, and come to the table unprepared to bargain over the proposals presented by your bargaining team.

If you want to keep up with your bargaining team’s proposals, UO’s proposals, and the current contract language, check out our Bargaining Tracker.

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How did GTFF respond to UO’s offers?

Your bargaining team passed several articles to UO that aim to improve our working conditions and make our lives as students and workers more livable.

• Article 33: Library Privileges — Your bargaining team agreed to cut language on library carrels as they are no longer used. However, your bargaining team disagreed with UO’s proposal to entirely eliminate the article from the contract because it protects library accessibility for both Masters and PhD students.
• Article XXX: Artificial Intelligence — This new article aims to clarify the role of AI in our GE positions in 6 main ways: requiring that UO notify your union about the implementation of new AI technology that may impact our jobs, emphasizing that AI may not be used to displace or replace GE positions, allowing GEs to decline use of AI, protecting GE work from being used to train AI without consent, prohibiting AI monitoring of GE productivity, and prohibiting the use of discriminatory surveillance technology.
• Articles 22 and 24: Financial Package — Last session, many GEs shared how important both health insurance and salary are to our lives as workers, students, and people. Your bargaining team decided to package them together in a joint proposal to UO, offering to drop to 8% across the board raises (down from 10%) if UO agrees to strike language that will cause health insurance costs to skyrocket for GEs.
• Article 18: Classifications & Letter of Agreement (LOA) Package — First of all, what’s a letter of agreement? Generally, it’s a supplement to the contract as a whole that aims to address an immediate or specific issue. Here, the letter of agreement would require UO to guarantee that, by reclassifying administrative GEs as either teaching or research GEs, they would not eliminate any of those GE positions in the process. In exchange, your bargaining team would consider accepting UO’s proposal to eliminate the category of administrative GEs.
• Article 13: Grievances — Your bargaining team agreed to some of UO’s proposals to extend grievances timelines to be more realistic, on the condition that UO also agree to language that specifies their own responsibility during the grievance process.
• Article 3: Union Rights — Your bargaining team made adjustments to proposed language regarding information requests to include clarity, but maintained that GTFF should not be restricted from discussing grievances or labor/management disputes at on-campus presentations.

Your bargaining team met with UO’s team and the state mediator on September 16th for 10 hours to try and come to an agreement over our contract! As a refresher, the state mediator’s role is to work with both sides to facilitate conversations and come to an agreement. Mediation allows us to both make official proposals as well as bounce ideas around to try to find creative solutions.

During the meeting, GTFF shared with UO that we have officially filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) with the state of Oregon. This is in response to UO’s lack of engagement with our bargaining process, including failing to regularly schedule sessions and or even agree to grammatical changes in articles. As we begin fall term, this is an unacceptable stance as GEs are seeing offers changed or revoked, rising costs of living, and other uncertainties that drastically impact our quality of life. 

Today, we sent UO a mediation package that both demands that UO make movements and takes into account their claims of financial precarity. A mediation proposal is not legally binding, allowing both teams to make proposals to test out ideas and interests. Practically speaking, that means we can move back from these mediation proposals to our last bargaining proposal. A bargaining proposal is legally binding. Your bargaining team has spent time during the last month gathering input from GEs through town halls, surveys, and other means in order to understand where our bottom lines are. We acknowledge that some of the items in this package, particularly our financial asks, are lower than what many of us were hoping for when we began bargaining. This package attempts to balance quality of life asks with some lower financial asks that reflect the state of our university and higher education at large. Below are some of the highlights from this mediation package: 

Financial Snapshot: We did not accept UO’s proposed five year contract, sticking with our originally proposed four-year contract. Additionally, we dropped our ask to remove our $61 fee but changed tuition waivers to include all course and lab fees. We have dropped our salary asks to 0% in the first year and 3% in following years. This change was done with the stipulation that we remove a clause in our health insurance article that has resulted in the doubling of our health insurance premiums (10% clause). Dropping the 10% clause both puts money back in GE’s pockets and imposes a much larger cost to UO. We’ve calculated the associated value of dropping the 10% clause plus our salary asks in the table below for a single GE on the GTFF health insurance. Averaging the financial value of this proposal across four years is a 4.2% raise.

Support for underrepresented groups: We reiterated our asks for notification and clarity around ICE and immigration enforcement on campus. We expanded visa reimbursements to include renewal fees but dropped our ask to create an immigration legal fund. We expanded the types of qualifying events and increased the amount of money caregivers could ask for through the Graduate Assistance Fund but dropped our ask for subsidized childcare through UO facilities. 

Working Environment: We dropped our asks to invoke limits for lead levels, temperatures, and AQI, reverting back to OSHA levels. We maintained UO’s requirement to provide alternative drinking water and notification when GEs are not required to work on campus due to AQI levels. 

This package put all articles into UO’s court. Over our 10 hours in mediation, UO responded with questions for multiple articles, 2 counter proposals, and our first TA (tentative agreement). Please see our article tracker for our entire package as well as UO’s responses!

Your bargaining team spent another 11-hour day bargaining with UO’s team yesterday! We have made movement on many articles, and we ended the day with 10 Tentative Agreements. But despite this movement, UO continues to give surface-level responses to many of our articles and has not made comparative movement on financial asks. 

Articles that we have tentatively agreed upon as of 9/30/

Preamble

Article 4: Dues Deduction

Article 9: Work Agreement/Work Assignment

Article 19: Summer Term

Article 28: Expense Reimbursement

Article 33: Library Privileges

Article 35: Immigration and Customs Enforcement  OR HB 4079 and UO policy changes have addressed our proposed changes

Article 38: Negotiation of Successor Agreement

Article 39: Printing and Distribution of the Contract

Appendix A: Data Delivery and FERPA Waiver

While we have not reached tentative agreements yet, we also received responses on: 

Article 3: Union Rights

Article 10: Workplace Health and Safety

Article 13: Grievances

Article 17: Appointment and Reappointment

Article 21: Layoffs

Article 22: Salary

Article 23: Tuition Waiver and Fees

Article 24: Health Insurance

Article 27: Support and Resources for International GEs

Article 29: Paid and Unpaid Absences

Article XXX: Artificial Intelligence

Appendix X: Reallocation of Administrative GEs

Article X: Academic Free Speech

While we made strides, there are still multiple articles that we are far apart on: 

Article 22: Salary and Article 24: Health Insurance

UO reduced summer FTEs again and met our raise proposal with 0% raises in first year and  3% raises in subsequent years. While UO increased their salary proposal, they DID NOT move on our health insurance article, stating they were unwilling to make major movement on healthcare without the union relinquishing control to UO. UO’s proposal and explanation made it clear that they are set on diminishing the power of our health insurance–either through diminishing their premium share (down to 89% this year) or through taking back the health trust that makes our insurance so great.  GTFF reaffirmed that our concessions on salary were CONTINGENT UPON movement on health insurance. Based on what we have heard from you, our members, we know that these issues cannot be separated. However, UO sees their movement as substantial and as mitigating the effects of insurance increases. 

UO did not agree to any major language proposed in Article 21: Layoffs, Article 27: Support and Resources for International GEs,  Article 10: Workplace Health and Safety, or Article 29: Paid and Unpaid Absences. UO did not agree to include Article X: Academic Freedom and Free Speech, stating that they believed these rights were already covered by UO’s general academic freedom policy.
 

Additionally, UO’s response to Article 3: Union Rights asks GTFF to pay for GE releases for union leadership, which are critical to running day to day aspects of the union. They also did not commit to running orientations for new GEs at the beginning of academic years. Discussions about the Division of Graduate Studies’ ability to put on orientation brought up indications of further cuts to the Division of Graduate Studies budget. We expressed our interest in working with the Division of Graduate Studies and other campus allies to ensure GEs get the onboarding and welcome we deserve.

Please check out the article tracker and the mediation summary for more detailed descriptions!

While we made substantial progress today, we do not feel as though UO has moved enough on financial asks, particularly salary and health insurance. For that reason, we will still be proceeding with a declaration of impasse that was sent to the state this morning (10/1/26). 

What does this mean? Impasse signals to all parties that the bargaining process is at a crucial juncture. We are not seeing the movement we need to see from UO on our financial proposals that would indicate that we will come to a deal without escalation. In one week, UO and GTFF will submit a package called a Last Best Final Offer (LBFO).  This package will include all of our articles that are still in active negotiations (i.e. everything that isn’t TAed). After LBFOs have been submitted, we will enter a 30 day period where we will continue to meet with UO and state mediators. After those 30 days we can continue to negotiate, GTFF can declare our intent to strike, or UO can impose their contract.