Well here we are in the Koessler Room of the Michigan League. Violet-​​tinted win­dows let the late-​​afternoon, late-​​winter light into the wood pan­eled room. There’s a big table across the front of the room. On the far side of the table are a number of well-​​kempt aca­d­emic types. On our side are a range of hastily cleaned-​​up, slightly underfed (vegans? smokers?) stu­denty looking types.

The rest of the room has chairs, some empty, some occu­pied with less-​​well-​​kempt slightly underfed stu­denty looking types. The pre­dom­i­nant sound is the clicking of laptop keys. The stu­denty types at the table occa­sion­ally ask a ques­tion, slowly and care­fully. The man in the center of the aca­d­emic types answers slowly and care­fully. There are pauses in between the ques­tions and the answers and the questions.

As each new sec­tion of the con­tract comes up, paper print-​​outs are passed out throughout the crowd. These copies show the con­tract pro­posal as sub­mitted by the union, with the administration’s response super­im­posed in the form of MS Word-​​style revi­sion mark-​​up. That mark-​​up is mostly in the form of large-​​scale deletions.

It’s not a par­tic­u­larly exciting event to live-​​blog. Most of the sub­stan­tive issues are dealt with very qui­etly and in small-​​scale language.

Here’s the gist as I see it:

Your request of pay raises in keeping with cost-​​of-​​living increase: No.

Your request for same-​​sex ben­e­fits: meh.

Your request for pay during required training events: No.

Your request for par­tial tuition waivers for small-​​fractional GSIs: No.

Your request for tuition waivers for quarter+ frac­tion GSIs: No.

The key words here are: “cur­rent con­tract lan­guage”. As in the old one. AT least we’re not losing ground I guess.

The jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is: we can’t deal with that pro­posal until we know what the finan­cial impact of those other pro­posals is. Repeat as necessary.

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Best moment so far: one of our guys asks “of the sub­stan­tive pro­posals we’ve put for­ward, can you think of a single one which you not turning down?” Followed by 20 sec­onds or so of silence. Then an “okay, moving along…”.

–

Us: “Given that almost every­thing you’ve given back to us is just “orginial con­tract lan­guage”, I’m a little sur­prised that it took you until today to give it to us…”

–

Also good (but again, the good stuff mostly comes from people get­ting frus­trated and saying stuff which prob­ably isn’t par­tic­u­larly productive):

Us: “You’ve framed this as a series of eco­nomic “reper­cus­sions”, which sounds really bad, we’ve framed it as an invest­ment in people who will bring more money to the school. Do you reject that philosophy?”

Them: “Well, can you ask a yes or no question?”

Us: “It was.”

–

Them: “With respect to your pro­posal for pro­fes­sional leave, the lan­guage you’ve pro­posed leaves it open to being as much as a term..”

Us: “Uh, I think you mean preg­nancy leave…”

Them: “Oh right sorry.”

Us: “Yeah ‘I have to go to a con­fer­ence, it lasts 4 months”.

Them: “Well, actu­ally, that could happen under the lan­guage you’ve pro­posed for pro­fes­sional leave too”.

Oh snap.

–

Us: “yes, so you’ve struck the word (inaudible), because it’s pas­sive and unclear I suppose…”

Other us: “…ask an eng­lish major…”

Them: “we’ll check that with our eng­lish majors…”

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And so on. Scintillating mate­rial. Now we’re nego­ti­ating the number of copies of the con­tract to be printed. Vigorously.