Hi everyone!
I wanted to provide the results for the furlough ratification vote and some information about how we move forward from here. I want to thank everyone for their questions and their participation in this most important vote. I encourage you to continue sending your feedback and ideas to our executive board. It will take every one of us working together to navigate the next year at Channel Islands.
Statewide Furlough Ratification Results
The CSUEU Board of Directors held a closed session teleconference on Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 4:00pm to discuss the results of the furlough ratification. The ratification vote took place by Unit and the results were tabulated statewide over the past week as each chapter finished up their voting process.
The statewide results were as follows:
* Unit 2 – 86% YES; 14% NO
* Unit 5 – 77% YES; 23% NO
* Unit 7 – 81% YES; 19% NO
* Unit 9 – 82% YES; 18% NO
The furlough agreement has officially been ratified by all bargaining units. This agreement will go into effect on August 1, 2009 and will last until June 30, 2010. It has been a hard month as the statewide Union pulled together to consider a decision between bad and worse. Overwhelmingly the membership have spoken and have chosen furloughs as the “better” option over layoffs. By no means should we celebrate this ratification, nor be happy with the state of affairs in the State of California or the California State University system.
The official press release can be found here:
http://www.csueu.org/Home/tabid/53/ctl/Details/mid/424/ItemID/455/Default.aspx
Chapter Furlough Ratification Results
Representatives of Chapter 324 met on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 5:00pm to tally our chapter votes. The votes were tallied by Rosario Cuevas (Ex-Officio), Joseph Dobzynski, Jr. (President), and Santos Ortega (Vice-President). The chapter results will be posted once the votes have been validated at the CSUEU home office.
Channel Islands is a unique chapter as the youngest campus within the system. Larger campuses have a wider breadth of seniority based on when the campuses were established, but we at Channel Islands have all been here about the same amount of time. It is heartwarming to see that we are overwhelmingly willing to sacrifice a little for the good of the group.
However, this does not mean that those who voted in favor of layoffs, or even those who voted for the furlough agreement, do not have legitimate concerns about this furlough agreement. I encourage anyone who has concerns about the furlough agreement to keep sending us feedback so we can continue to work with management to ensure our employees are represented to the best of our ability and to the letter of our collective bargaining agreement and our newly ratified furlough agreement.
Moving Forward
Our next steps will be to enact this furlough agreement and get our final questions answered by the Chancellor’s Office, including a full list of exempted classifications. A statewide labor management committee concerning workload also needs to be established to protect all represented employees from being assigned more work than they should be expected to perform for the duration of this furlough agreement. Chapter 324 is still committed to working with management to keep the lines of communication open and to establish a campus-level labor management committee to work with management and other Unions to make sure our voices are heard. We believe now that ratification has completed that we should be able to sit at the table and discuss furloughs for our campus. Your feedback to date has been very helpful for shaping the conversation at our campus.
In Union,
Joseph Dobzynski, Jr.
CSUEU Chapter 324 – President