RRCFA President's idea for voting on bargaining proposals

Fellow Instructors:

One of the problems we have belonging to MGEU (in my opinion) is the bargaining proposal process.

Here are the problems as I see them:

1. Proposals must include the name of the person making the proposal. In my opinion, we should be able to make proposals anonymously.

2. Proposals are voted on in public. In my opinion, members should be able to vote anonymously for or against submitted proposals.

2. The window for submitting proposals is very short. In my opinion, members should be encouraged to submit proposals from the day a contract is signed until the next bargaining season begins.

3. Members are only allowed to see the bargaining proposals if they attend one or more bargaining proposal meetings that are often held at a time when members cannot attend. For example, the first of only two meetings held to vote on submitted proposals was scheduled to be held on 21 October 2024 from 5 until 7PM. Personally, I had a class from 4 until 6PM and only arrived at the meeting a little after 6:20 PM. The meeting ended up going until 8 PM. Luckily, I had no other family obligations so I was able to stay an hour longer. The second meeting was held on MS Teams from noon until 1 PM on Friday, 25 October 2024. I imagine many Instructors had classes at that time or were getting ready for classes. Besides, not every member wants to attend a bargaining committee meeting while they are sitting at their desk at work.

4. The submitted proposals is never made available electronically or on paper to members. They are only displayed on a screen during the two meetings. In my opinion, both the rejected and approved proposals should be made available to all members electronically.

4. Hardly any members end up showing up to the meetings to discuss and vote on the submitted bargaining proposals. At the meeting on 21 October 2024, I counted 20 members in the room. In my opinion, we should allow members to discuss proposals in writing (or by submitting audio or video recordings of themselves) over an extended period of time (weeks, if not months) to allow everyone a chance to read the submissions, read the comments made my other members, make comments of their own, then vote on which proposals they think should be brought to the bargaining table. I also think members should be able to rank the approved proposals so that the bargaining team knows which proposals are the most important to the members.

How can we address the problems listed above now and in the future:

All of the above problems could be addressed with some kind of website where only members can sign in and participate in the discussion. Such a website would be relatively easy to create but would cost more than the RRCFA currently has in its bank account. If we are able to create our own bargaining unit, I think we should definitely demand that such a website be created, whether we stay with or leave MGEU.

I have tried to find a free online service or app that will allow us to easily allow all Instructors to make suggestions, share ideas, complaints, comments, bargaining proposals and indicate their support for or against proposals. I think I have found an app we can use but it requires a small amount of time by each person to set up.

I found a social media platform you can sign up for at https://mewe.com . You can also download an app on your smartphone if you wish. In order to participate anonymously, you need to use a fake name and Username like RRCFAmember123. We will then send a link to your personal email address so you can join a PRIVATE group where only members can post, comment and show their support for posts and comments. I am recommending the following method to provide feedback on posts. Respond with a thumbs up emoji to show that you've read a post. Respond with a heart emoji to show that you agree with a post. This website shows how many of each kind of emoji have been used. Any other emoji will be considered a wasted vote