Hi everyone!
I wanted to provide a response to the proposed campus furlough plan put forth by the Academic Senate, CFA, and the administrators today.
Labor Management Meeting
Today, Santos Ortega represented Chapter 324 in a Labor-Management Meeting attended by Dr. Rush (President), Joanne Coville (VP of Finance & Administration), John Yudelson (Representing CFA), Tina Torres (Representing APC), Santos Ortega (Representing CSUEU), Mike Middleton (Representing SETC), and Shawn Bartlett (Representing UAPD). The proposed campus furlough plan was presented at the meeting to the Union representatives for initial comment. It was the first time that anyone from the Chapter 324 Executive Board had seen the proposed plan. A follow-up meeting will be scheduled later this week to continue discussions about the proposed campus furlough plan. We would like to see these meetings continue throughout this furlough period, and beyond, to help build relationships between the Unions and management.
Response to the Proposed Campus Furlough Plan
The proposed campus furlough plan is a mixed bag for Chapter 324. We endorse the decision to minimize the impact to students and the commitment to campus closures. We believe campus closures will minimize the impact to employees as well, and will allow CSU-CI to capitalize on energy savings throughout the campus. However, our membership has spoken out strongly against a “rolling” furlough plan as proposed by this furlough plan – due to the impact it will have on employees seeking secondary employment and for certain classifications, such as lab technicians, who will not have enough time to prepare labs for the following day (among others).
We are also concerned that CSUEU was not involved in the initial furlough planning sessions for a couple of reasons. First, CSUEU lead the way on negotiating furloughs to preserve as many jobs as possible across the state. Second, I had previously stated that we could not be involved in the discussions for legal reasons, and yet we see that CFA was included in the discussions for this proposed campus furlough plan. We have requested the legal rationale, particular since other campuses throughout the system, most notably Stanislaus, Chico, and Fresno, brought all the Unions in on the initial discussions. Finally, Chapter 324 has expressed a willingness to work with management through this difficult time, but were not included in the initial conversations and our comment period was relegated to the general comment period for the campus.
A formal response was sent to Joanne Coville about our position on this proposed campus furlough plan. I anonymously included all of the feedback submitted over the past week so management will understand our thoughts and concerns – both good and bad – with the furlough plans in general, and about rolling furloughs in particular. I want to encourage everyone to continue sending feedback to the executive board so we can send along our collective response to this plan. I also want to thank everyone who has submitted feedback to date to help us understand how our membership feels.
Budget Brown Bag Meeting
We encourage everyone to attend the Budget Brown Bag meeting scheduled for Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 12:00pm in Broome Library 1360 to speak out about this proposed campus furlough plan, both for and against. We believe it is important that our membership is heard during this time, not just by your duly elected Union officers, but also by everyone in the trenches. Never before has it been this important to have our voices heard, and this appears to be our only venue to do so to date.
In Union and Solidarity,
Joseph Dobzynski, Jr.
CSUEU Chapter 324 – President