For roughly five months, University of Oregon’s Student Workers Union has been bargaining with UO in an attempt to win a labor contract. Now, 67 open proposals remain on the table and only one tentative agreement has been reached in approximately five months.
According to lead UOSW negotiators, such as Ashton Pressman, the student workers feel that UO is not taking claims of discrimination seriously and is not listening to students and their needs.
One of UOSW’s major disagreements with the university concerns harassment and discrimination. According to Pressman, dozens of student workers testified at the last few sessions about discrimination in the workplace.
UOSW released an anti-harassment and discrimination proposal in a Sept. 9 bargaining session.
The university countered this proposal with their own, saying discrimination isn’t a relevant topic for bargaining sessions.
According to Pressman, who is a Global Scholars Hall dining hall worker, he was told he was “divorced from reality” by Title IX coordinator Nicole Commissiong after discussing his experience with gender-based workplace discrimination.
UO spokesperson Eric Howald and Pressman said that Commissiong was not in the room when the gender-based discrimination conversation was discussed.
The Emerald reached out to Commissiong for comment, but did not receive a response.
Then, according to Pressman, the administration told UOSW they wished they didn’t have an anti-discrimination article in the other campus union contracts.
According to Howald, the discussion of gender-based workplace discrimination between Pressman and Commissiong was interpreted differently by Commissiong.
“Information was shared about the option to report to the federal Office of Civil Rights. Students said that that office didn’t take complaints about race discrimination and other concerns seriously. At that point, Nicole said that [saying that the federal Office of Civil Rights doesn’t take race discrimination and other concerns seriously] is ‘divorced from the reality of how the federal government had been handling complaints over the past year,'” Howald said in an email to the Emerald.
Mae Bracelin, a Global Scholars dining hall worker, described the meetings with the administration as strained and disrespectful.
“The university is out of touch with its workforce’s needs, they are so far away from their workforce that even when our co-workers go to them and say, ‘These are the problems and these are the solutions we need to enact,’ they can’t see it as a problem because they are so high up in their ivory towers,” Bracelin said. “If it wasn’t an issue then we wouldn’t be here,” Bracelin said.
One proposal UO brought to the table would split the Resident Assistant roles into two positions and subsequently lower their pay. Ryan Campbell, a bargaining member and RA at Yasui Hall, stressed the importance of keeping the current RA position.
“For a lot of people, this job is the reason they can come to this school. Having that $1,500 off, having meals and a place to live, all that stuff is really important,” Campbell said.
Campbell, Bracelin and Pressman expressed their concerns that UO is focused solely on profit.
“At the end of the day, it’s like, ‘Are you coming to the table wanting a better university or a better profit margin?’” Bracelin and Pressman said.
Campbell said UOSW and UO have been working together more during the past few meetings compared to the spring, but the union still feels “disrespected” by the university.
Bracelin said that the current rate of negotiations is unreasonable and could lead to state mediation, which would force employers and employees to form a contract through fair bargaining.
According to Bracelin, striking is also on the table, but Bracelin said it is a last-resort option.
“We don’t necessarily want to strike, we want them to respect us, we want to get a contract, but if they aren’t going to treat us as adults and like colleagues, we will have to hostage our labor force to win that contract,” Bracelin said.
UO has declined to comment to the Daily Emerald about the active bargaining sessions.
Editor’s note: Information was added above based on an email from UO spokesperson Eric Howald about the Sept. 9 bargaining session, the exchange between Pressman and Commissiong and Commissiong’s absence during the gender-based discrimination discussion.
