Monday, May 7, 2012

365: HOLY SHIT






That's all I can say! Earlier this year I was reading my HRC magazine and I saw an article about the practice of "Grossing Up" by (so far) private companies to offset the tax penalties for domestic partners imposed by the Federal Government. As I've mentioned before this practice is obviously unfair and bothers the shit out of me (e.g. if Ange were a man I wouldn't pay taxes, but because we are same sex partners we're taxed--at 40% no less!) and of course being the sassy person I am I decided to do something about it.

Being new I didn't really know where to go so I reached out to my friend Jill who is the student rep to the CSU Board of Trustees and I figured would know where to go. She had some ideas and we both spent time meeting individually with people and together with some people. We were told there wasn't going to be much luck at changing things but we still thought it was important to put on the table. I worked mainly with people on campus and Jill worked mainly with the unions (student and faculty) and various trustees.

I hadn't heard much about it lately and as it's the end of the semester and I'm going to Africa in 2 weeks I haven't thought much about it. Today the Chancellor's Office released a statement related to the break down in negotiations between the CFA and the CSU and had a whole bunch of links to various things. One was a link to a "a handwritten list of items" to discuss. ONE OF THE ITEMS (of 9!) WAS GROSSING UP! OMG!!! My heart literally skipped a beat! [link here to the full list: http://www.calstate.edu/LaborRel/Contracts_HTML/bargaining-proposals/2012/04062012-CFA-05032012-Notes.pdf]

Now I'm not claiming this was solely because of the work that Jill and I did, but that's a pretty big coincidence! So whoever has been carrying this torch all the way to the negotiating table on behalf of the 23,000 faculty members in CA I say AWESOME JOB & THANK YOU!



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