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weloki on 11. 07.05
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Friday, November 12th
Meeting notes

GEO Meeting Notes 11/10/04

Report-back from CWA:

CWA has agreed to cooperate with GEO, although we will not proceed to an official affiliation at this point. We will work together for the next 3-6 months before making a decision on this. The CWA National has agreed to fund Abbey (the local intern for CWA) one day a week to work on GEO. Unfortunately, Abbey will be gone for the spring semester, though if any GEO members would like a part-time job, CWA would be happy to train someone to get paid for 8 hours of GEO work and some extra time with the CWA local.

CWA recommends that we spend most of our time building the organization by speaking individually with grad students on campus. We will begin recruiting organizers from all departments who will then speak individually to members of their own department about GEO, attempting to build our membership base.

CWA wants us to see this project as a long-term commitment. We face serious obstacles first with the state laws and second with the University’s Conditions of Cooperation, which explicitly exclude us from recognition as a union. In order to officially unionize, we will have to change this by taking a request to the Board of Trustees. We will not be able to successfully petition the Board of Trustees, however, until we can demonstrate mass membership.

CWA also suggests that we might want to focus on establishing a grievance procedure, which we do not currently have outside of departments. We decided to continue our major focus on dental and insurance for now, but we will also begin investigating the grievance procedure issue.


Contacts with other orgs and health care reportback:

Adrianne made contact with organizers at several other universities while researching our health care plan. In particular, some GEO members from the University of Michigan are interested in visiting Bloomington to do an organizer training. She will invite them for January if they are available at this time.

Membership meeting on Wednesday:

We will have a membership meeting next Wednesday to update people on the affiliation process and to recruit volunteers for the organizing drive. Ursula will develop a flyer and a handout. Ursula and Adrianne will speak, and Amos will lead the question and answer section. Adrianne will send out an email about the meeting.

Constitution:

We will continue to take comments, and we will incorporate some of the comments we have received thus far. The constitution will remain a draft until January, when we elect representatives.

admin on 11. 12.04
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Sunday, November 7th
GEO Constitution

GEO%20Constitution.doc (36k file)
admin on 11. 07.04
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Thursday, November 4th
Meeting Minutes 11/4/04

Members present: Dave, Adrianne, Jessica, Melissa, Amos, Ursula

Constitution:
Ursula wrote a draft of a constitution based on CWA local constitutions and several other grad union constitutions. During the meeting, we began the process of revising this draft. I will mail out another draft in the next day or so. I will also post a draft to the website. We welcome comments from everyone on big or small issues!

Major decisions on the constitution:
At this point, membership will be open to all grad students.
We decided on a structure consisting of two co-coordinators, a treasurer, an internal communications officer, an external communications officer, and four members at large. We will have our first election the third week of school next semester. Nominations will begin the first week of school next semester. We will hold elections by paper ballot, and officers will be elected for the remainder of the school year this time but, in the future, they will be elected for one year. This structure is open to changes if other members would like to contribute ideas.

Regular meetings:
Regular meetings for the rest of the semester will take place on Wednesdays at 8:30. Amos will reserve a room on campus. Our next general membership meeting will be Wednesday, November 17.

Next meeting with CWA:
We will meet with CWA's district organizer, Susan Baxter-Fleming, on Monday, November 8 at 9:00 in Poplars 331. Anyone is welcome to come (though you may want to let us know ahead of time so we know how many people to count on).

List of grad students:
Dave will continue to work on getting the detailed list of grad students.



admin on 11. 04.04
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