The Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF) contract ratification vote opens today, as the Federation’s General Membership moves to decide whether the latest round of bargaining with the University will provide graduate teaching fellows with satisfactory wages, benefits and working conditions for the next two years.
The vote comes in the wake of August 14’s heated, 17-hour mediation session, when the GTFF’s bargaining team and University representatives fashioned a tentative agreement delineating improved working conditions for graduate student teachers. Now it is up to the Federation’s over 1,300 voting GTF members to ratify the new contract articles by determining whether the University’s concession of a 4 percent minimum wage increase, a more accountable hiring system and increased health benefits is enough to placate frustrations stemming from failed late-June negotiations.
Four months ago, deliberations over the new contract’s terms slowed to a standstill as GTFF representatives realized that dealings with the University could no longer continue constructively because the University was not meeting demands, and as a result chose to involve an official mediator from Oregon’s Employment Relations Board.
The GTFF’s grievance officer Daniel Andersen, also a University political science Ph.D. student and a member of the Federation’s last two bargaining agreements, said the University’s standoffishness in the latest bargaining sessions is the main reason for the vote coming so late in the year.
“This latest round of negotiations demonstrated for the first time a blatant unwillingness to take our proposals seriously … (which is) what made the process drag on for over a year, and why we ended up going to State-sponsored mediation,” Andersen said. “So I would say generally we have worked together well, but bargaining this time around was a much more difficult experience than we have been used to having with the University.”
Even with the University’s concession to the Federation’s demands, Andersen still thinks the GTFs are still being short-changed considering their immensely important roles as supplementary educators.
“Of course, they still have a way to go in compensating us for the work we do fully – we still are substantially under-compensated for the amount of work we do on this campus,” Andersen said. “Departments need and want GTF labor.”
Richard Linton, the University’s vice-president for research and graduate studies, said the University has always appreciated the work of GTFs, and is satisfied that the new compensation package and provisions for transparency in the hiring process will satisfy both parties in the end.
“The University recognizes the essential role GTFs play in supporting the educational and research missions of the University,” Linton said. “The new collective bargaining agreement … (will) further address the shared goal of the University and its GTFs to optimize transparency in GTF hiring practices and to assure GTF workload issues are appropriately managed.”
GTFF Lead Negotiator Dave Cecil wrote a note to GTFF workers on the Federation’s website shortly after the conclusion of August’s mediation session, delineating the gains and compromises made by the bargaining team.  
“(We achieved) minimal increases in the cost of health insurance for dependents and in summer for the next two years, with hard caps on the amount of increases GTFs will have to face,” Cecil said. “We have (also) been fighting to make it so the UO cannot fire or refuse to hire based on the subjective judgment of faculty when it comes to satisfactory academic progress, (and we) think that this arrangement, while not perfect, protects grads against arbitrary and capricious actions by the faculty.”
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