Referendum to repeal The Executive Leadership Remuneration Act (ELRA)

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Hi everyone

As I am one of the two PSD reps to @grad-council, some of my constituents have reached out to me asking for more information about the upcoming student government Referendum to repeal The Executive Leadership Remuneration Act (ELRA); see email from Max Freedman (mfreedman@uchicago.edu) on Fri May 18 in your inbox.

I thought it will be a good idea to create this topic to collect all relevant information about the proposal together and let people ask questions and discuss the referendum to be able to make an informed choice on the day of the repeal vote on June 8.

Relevant Documentation:

  1. The Executive Leadership Remuneration Act (ELRA) text:

    Worth noting that

    Administration of the awards shall be done by the Committee on Recognized Student Organizations in the same manner as Student Leadership Recognition Awards (SLRA) are paid

    More info about CORSO is at http://sg.uchicago.edu/committee-on-recognized-student-organizations/

  2. Meeting minutes for Student Government (SG) General Assembly (GA) dated Monday May 14, 2018 when the above proposal was passed:

  3. SG budget proposal approved during GA dated April 23, 2018, note that the funding for the exec pay remuneration will come from the SG Administrative Budget:

    It is worth noting that administrative budget tends to be historically underutilized, relevant portion of minutes approving the reduction of administrative budget from Apr 23 GA minutes:

    • 2.h SG Administrative Budget
      1. Funds SG’s working and capital expenses, money overseen by Slate
      2. This year’s slate has only spent ~$4000
      3. This pot historically has a substantial source of rollover, and we want to stay committed to spending Student Life fees as close as possible to when they’re being paid
        • –36.76% change in this year’s budget
      4. Slate recommends maintaining the admin budget until Assembly approves other uses—potential exec funding pay proposals if approved could come from this pot but if that does not pass it could be cut even more
      5. Slate has found it really hard to spend all the money it has—often, Slate works with administrators who have money themselves
      6. Sustainability Committee and other groups that haven’t been funded except by Exec Slate is another place this budget could go toward; there’s some wiggle room

  4. All previous SG GA minutes are available at http://sg.uchicago.edu/minutes/

There was about 25 minutes of discussion on the proposal among the assembly before the vote was called, so please take a look at the arguments from both sides at GA May 14, 2018.pdf (110.5 KB) before posting a question here, it may have been already answered. But otherwise, please feel free to ask questions and present your own arguments for/against the referendum.

To make the choices clear, if you are in favor of the pay proposal, you want to cast “NO” on the repeal vote on June 8, but if you want the proposal repealed, you want to cast your vote as “YES”.

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Sorry, I forgot to share the following notes on some research done by SG secretaries on exec pay at other schools. It was shared with GC reps on the day of the vote:

There is a national level survey on which some of the above research is based: http://www.asgaonline.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?type=gen&mod=Core%20Pages&gid=46AA0269CCDB4D9FB291F27581A56562

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Recent Maroon coverage for the referendum and ELRA:

and a pretty strong case in favor of ELRA by two CC representatives:

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Are graduate students under the domain of SG? Or is it just an undergrad thing? Most of the discussion I’ve been hearing about this has been from undergrads yet graduate students represent the majority of the voting population…

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Graduate students indeed come under the domain of Student Government. See the structure here: http://sg.uchicago.edu/structure/

The reason undergrads have been talking more about it is because historically SG has been composed primarily of undergrads. But there is no reason to assume that the SG Executive Slate couldn’t be graduate students in future.

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Voting is open now until 4pm!