Droppin' the F-Bomb

So I went to a bargaining session today, the first I'd been to since we concluded the silly season bargaining two years ago (complete with Trivial Pursuit questions to wile away the hours spent in caucus), and damn if I didn't have the strangest sense of déjà vu: it was like I was watching myself, only better looking.

What triggered this powerful sense of being there before was the rhetoric used by the university. Yes, that was it... but the rhetoric didn't have the same re-heated quality that the Chinese food from three days ago has. No, it was more like the recurring fruitcake that Grandma keeps sending you for Christmas (and you keep sneaking back into her cupboard while visiting in the Spring) - in this case, the perennial arguments drawn from some Reagan-era Human Resources handbook about "how to deal with your uppity unionized workers."

And so they dropped the "F-Bomb."

I know what some of you are thinking - Linton, sick and tired of our bargaining teams sharp questioning and snide comments, finally snaps and delivers a Cheney-esque "Go fuck yourself!" Now that would be some fireworks, boy howdy! But no, the Bosses delivered the re-heated "flexibility" sermon, served with a fresh sprig of the issue du jour to which they would not agree. And who could be against flexibility? Sometimes you need a day off. We're flexible! Sometimes we need to not pay you. Be flexible!

"Flexibility," in the employer lexicon, means "we can do what we want." It's a nice little trick where the Bosses can have their cake and eat it, too: they can agree that work assignments should be delivered two weeks before the start of the term, but they don't actually have to do anything to make sure that this occurs. "Flexibility's" ugly cousin, who rarely gets mentioned, and sure as hell never gets asked to prom, is "non-accountability." If a term is rendered so ambiguously as to be meaningless, it is less likely to be grieved, and even less likely to be ruled upon favorably by an arbiter, making the whole point of a contractual provision moot. The Bosses pretty much 'fessed up to that agenda today at the table. They don't want to have to enforce what's in the contract. And the de facto consequence is that they can continue to do whatever they want.

So that's how the F-bomb was dropped. But now that I think about it, "flexibility" does begin to sound more and more like "fuck you."

See more news from our side of the table at the GTFF's bargaining blog.