Rutgers Council of AAUP Chapters -- Rutgers University Temporary Work Space

From CGEU

To: Darrin

From: Brian, Charlotte, Kristen, Scott

Date: October 10, 2007

Re: Release-time Organizing, September Report

Membership Organizing

• New TA Orientations: We organized membership drives at all of the large campus orientations, including the Graduate School Orientation, the Teaching Assistant Project Orientation, the Writing Program Orientation, and the International Student Orientation. For the first time, we also got invitations to smaller, department-specific orientations including: Philosophy, History, Education, Geography, Visual Arts, Classics, Political Science, Anthropology, Education. Over 130 new members resulted from these efforts.

• Organizing Database: The organizing database has not been updated yet this year but we are working with AAUP-AFT staff to get it updated within a week. Once it is updated to reflect this school year, we will work with Galina to get a regular update scheduled every 2 weeks, when payroll sends updates. Despite our hard work during the 2006-2007 school year, the smooth integration of the organizing database with the AAUP-AFT database remains a problem. Part of the problem lies with the AAUP-AFT staff making the organizing database an integral part of the union's organizing efforts, another part is the slow response of AFT national to our needs for technical assistance, and a third part of the problem is that we spent many months last year working toward transition to the AFT's new organizing database but realized it was not able to satisfy our organizing needs. Since we do not have our organizng database updated yet, we have not been able to enter any data on new grads to whom we have talked, since they are not in the database yet. We are also working with Galina to run the list of previous union members who left the unit and have returned; a newly negotiated contract provision allows us to restore these members' status without having them sign up again. We estimate from database crosschecks that this will result in between forty and fifty recovered members.

• Turf: We finalized the turf and started with the wall charts – we will finish these ASAP and put up on the wall at AFT. We are keeping biweekly records of membership growth to ensure that we reach our membership goals by the end of the fall semester and the end of the academic year. Each of us has started to approach stewards from last year in our respective departments to get them back into action, and to recruit stewards to support membership growth in departments that did not have stewards.

• Contract Party: The AAUP-AFT and the Graduate Student Association held a joint party to celebrate the new contract on September 29. We estimate that more than 200 people attended. We signed up 27 new members at the party.

• Membership Sign-up Contest: We are developing a membership competition for any TA/GA who wants to participate. The grad who signs up the most members will win a red iPod Nano (Rutgers colors and part of the purchase price goes to a good cause). We will be running the contest for a month (probably October 22 – November 21). We will be holding a mandatory training for all participants at two different times to discuss rules and also to discuss approaching people about the union. We have already had an enthusiastic response, and are recruiting leaders of various campus organizations to publicize the event, particularly among TA/GA populations with low membership.

Department Meetings

• We are organizing department meetings to talk with grads about the new contract and about membership. Recent meetings were held in the following departments:

Visual Arts

Theater

Bloustein School of Planning and Policy

Music

Physics

English

Social/Cultural Organization Outreach

• We are reaching out to graduate student social and cultural organizations as another means to gain access to graduate student networks on campus. We have had positive responses from the following organizations and have conducted or will soon conduct joint events with each of them.

Rutgers Chinese Students and Scholars Association (RCSSA)

International Students Activities Committee (ISAC)

Pansexualia (LGBT/Q)