Bargaining and Power
March 29, 2011 Leave a comment
The first thing the administration will tell is that all the unjust actions they are taking with regards to our jobs are “in our best interest.” That, due to the “money situation,” we should be happy with the status quo. After all, there are so many people out there without jobs at all, we should be grateful for what we have.
I’m afraid to say that I am most certainly not grateful for steadily rising fees – they have tripled in the last ten years and are still going up – a health care plan than only helps the healthy, and a university that prefers using fear to control the students, faculty, staff, and graduate assistants.
I have spent the last year bargaining with the GA United bargaining team.There are two phrases that keep coming back from the other side of the table: “You don’t want that, it’s not in your best interest” and, as time went on, “No.”
Our demands were not unreasonable. We were asking for things that would cost the university nothing, or very little, and would make a living wage easier for graduate assistants to obtain and a safer, healthier, happier work environment for everyone. A fee freeze at the current level – which is around $1500, or about the equivalent of over one month’s pay for doctoral students (before taxes) – would cost the university absolutely nothing. Sitting down in a room with graduate assistants to look at alternatives to the frankly unjust health care and insurance policy we have would cost the university nothing. Rearranging the ways assistantships are handled to provide multi-year contract options and give assistants job security would cost the university nothing.
And yet, all of these perfectly reasonable demands – these proposals that we were happy to negotiate on – were “not in our best interest.”
That is the language a parent uses with a child. I am not a child. I am an adult and an employee and I deserve better. We all do.
The unilateral actions of the administration with regard to four unions – Association of Civil Service Employees, Non-Tenure Track Faculty, Faculty Association, and GA United – is the work of an authoritarian parent who wishes the troublemaking children to go sit in the corner, chastened, until we realize what we have done is bad. They will tell you that it is about the money – it’s not. It’s about silencing your voices, taking away our right to have a say in our wages, benefits, and working conditions. It’s about power.
I refuse to let them take away my power. I refuse. This is me saying “No.” This is the time for all of us to stand up and say “No, what you want is what is not in our best interest.”
See what the faculty have to say against the administration’s actions.
