Employee Assembly
Minutes
May 27, 1998
G08 Uris Hall
12:15 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.

I. Open Forum

T.Hoebbel asked that the minutes of previous meeting be distributed more in advance than the morning of or at the meeting. Taking time to read the minutes during the meeting wastes time that could be used more productively. M.Overstrom stated that the Office of Assemblies waits to attach the minutes with the agenda, and the agenda for the last two meetings has only been completed a couple hours before the meeting. He requested that the minutes be distributed without the agenda. This was approved.

II.Approval of Minutes

Lettie Caswell offered the following corrections:

• page 4, 2nd paragraph “…for as much release…” and “…for training, if any, and such…”;
• page 4, 3rd paragraph “…to keep one’s job up with technological changes”;
• page 5, 14th paragraph “…The release time accrual policy of two hours per week has been used before”;
• page 5, 15th paragraph “…she noted that they this appears…”.

Minutes of May 6, 1998 Employee Assembly approved as amended

III. Announcements and Reports

a. Report from Trustee Cyndy Tkachuck

M.Overstrom asked if everyone got Cyndy’s email about the Board of Trustees meeting? M.Overstrom found it difficult to follow the verbal reports given at the meeting because only Board members were given copies of the agenda.

b. 5/18/98 Rogers/Opperman Luncheon

1) The Employee Assembly Budget was approved for this year. In November CJ Lance-Duboscq and G.Brandt will meet again with the budget group to plan an annual allocations.

2) Expansion of PawPrint was not approved. Although the budget group would like to have approved this expansion, they felt there were higher priority requests that needed the available money. T.Hoebbel thought they might be able to find some money, but they didn’t want to hire another person, and if we want the budget group to take the need for this expansion seriously, there should be a response this year as a reaction to the fact that funding was not approved. A list of all those people and groups who have asked for more space in PawPrint and a contact person from each of those groups is being prepared. A letter to PawPrint, memos to F.Rogers and the other members of the budget group, and a letter to President Rawlings were suggested. C.Gardner recommended the same letter not be sent to President Rawlings and PawPrint, explaining that President Rawlings should be given the opportunity to respond before the request is made public. C.Gardner felt that once the list of groups who have been unable to publish information because of lack of space has been collected that a good way to perform as their advocate would be to convey this information in a letter to President Rawlings. CJ Lance-Duboscq said that she does not want to bypass M.Opperman on this issue. It is her staff that we are talking about. C.Gardner presented some history regarding the evolution of PawPrint and pointed out that it was through EA efforts that a full time person (D.Stein) was hired to manage PawPrint rather than the previous volunteer staff. It was concluded that M.Overstrom would email M.Opperman about the concerns the EA has on this issue, care should be taken not to interfere with D.Stein’s job responsibilities.

3) There were several concerns presented about the DRAFT Employee Development Policy: release time being tracked by accrual is an unwieldy process, partly because of the lack of a system to track release time by the hour; concerns were expressed about specifying the release time allowed for serving on committees; and there were objections to the words, “business constraints” when referring to denial justification of release time, but there were no recommendations of what the words should be. There is still some confusion on the term “release time”. Originally the cap was 96 hours, but it was felt that number of hours would scare supervisors, and the cap was changed to 40 hours. L.Caswell did not feel that anyone at the luncheon knew what the time should be. M.Overstrom thought that M.Opperman was struggling with that too. It was suggested that may be because the People Soft system would not be capable to track those hours. It was brought up that legislation is about to be passed allowing employees to take health and personal time on an hourly basis rather than only daily or weekly. The question then arises, if release time cannot be tracked, how will this legislation be tracked. Regarding the objection to the verbiage about “budget constraints”, L.Caswell said one of the prime reasons was that, a supervisor could turn someone down if “there is no budget for training, or the existing budget allocation has been depleted.” She felt Fred’s thinking was that he is urging offices to include training money in their budgets, and he would like to see units beefing up their training money. That helps HR and the University.

4) It was explained that departments charging each other for services is the means used to manage supply and demand.

c. 5/21/98 Breakfast w/Dean-elect Cooke

It was agreed that Dean-elect Cooke was very refreshing and seemed genuinely interested in employees’ concerns.

IV. Business of the Day - Year in Review

M.Overstrom gave the Board of Trustee presentation she had prepared for their meeting in May, which was a review of the work of the Employee Assembly over the last year. She received many complements and an applause for her presentation.

V. Old Business

a. EA Mission Statement

CJ Lance-Duboscq gave the reasons for and suggested changes to the original Mission Statement, and she also proposed  a revised statement (which is attached).  L.Caswell suggested that the phrase “The EA will participate in the governance of the University,” be deleted.  CJ Lance-Duboscq encouraged others to recommend changes that would improve the Mission Statement and asked that people send these recommendations to her.

b. Report by the Internal Group

Committee on Committees

CJ Lance-Duboscq reported that the IOC would like to, if the whole committee agrees, have the IOC, with addition of some members, look at committees, instead of creating a Committee on Committees. It was also agreed that the Chair and Vice Chair should attend at least one of the meetings of the EA committees a year, to help bring them back “into the fold” of the EA, so the committees do not become an entity of themselves. CJ would also like to draft a letter to people who were DSA nominees and DSA winners last year to invite them to participate on committees.

Volunteerism

L.Caswell asked if the number of employees volunteering for committees has changed in the last year. C.Gardner said that the number has reduced.

CJ Lance-Duboscq said she would also like to see the EA Chair draft a letter at the beginning of each year to all the new and returning committee members welcoming them to another year. M.Overstrom concurred and suggested that they also be invited to more of the EA meetings.

L.Caswell proposed that a letter be drafted from the EA Chair to send to supervisors of employees who have expressed an interest in serving on committees, since we ran into the problem this year of supervisors who wanted verification that their employees were actually serving on these committees. In the interest of streamlining efforts, C.Gardner suggested that the name of the employee’s supervisor be asked on the committee application and a copy of the employee’s committee appointment letter be sent to the supervisor.

c. Report by the External Group

Frontline Feedback

Two more sessions with office professionals have been held, and another meeting is scheduled with the group as a whole to set up some more sessions.

EA Training

CJ Lance-Duboscq said she would like to have a couple sessions in the summer for EA members to learn Roberts Rules of Parliamentary Procedures. C.Gardner recommended that Professor Russ Martin, who taught a semester course on Roberts Rules at Cornell, be asked to conduct a workshop. This would take at least three hours. There was some discussion of the value of that much time devoted to Roberts Rules to have more effective meetings. M.Overstrom recommended that the new EA Chair and Vice-Chair get together and finalize this plan.

VI. Farewell

L.Caswell bade farewell to the EA members and said she will be remaining actively involved through her committee.

VII. Adjournment

The meeting was adjourned at 1:35 PM

Attachment Original Mission Statement

To seek out and voice effectively the interests and concerns of University employees to the administration in regard to University personnel policies and other policies affecting the employment environment so as to offer employees a vehicle for the continuous involvement of all staff members in the governance of non-academic affairs and in the life of the University.

Key Concerns: 1) Statement is too broad. What is our participation? How do we define it? 2) No statement regarding the importance of self-governance. 3) Wording is very undefined. 4) What term do we use to label our constituency?

Suggested Changes:

-Make an opening statement defining what the Employee Assembly is. -Create a more definitive statement regarding our participation in the governance system. -Define our processes and our relationships to our constituency and administration. -Make the statement more inclusive of the kinds of things the EA does and the people it speaks for.

This is just an idea:

The Employee Assembly is committed to self-governance within the community of Cornell University. The EA will participate in the governance of the University, representing employee needs and concerns. The EA will conduct itself through committees and other resources to provide employees with information concerning the decision making processes that affect them, organizational changes, and administration and creation of policies. The EA will work closely with other University assemblies and administrative units regarding personnel policies and resolutions to create a diverse and inclusive employee community at Cornell University.