Fellow workers,

On Tuesday, May 24, GEO’s Bargaining Committee met with the administration to continue negotiations for our next contract. More than a dozen rank-and-file members joined us at the table, and together we sent admin a clear message: the semester may be over, but we’re not going to accept anything less than a fair contract for ALL graduate workers. To this end we reaffirmed our major economic proposals: 10.5% raises, full retroactive pay for all grad workers employed during the life of the contract, and the removal of the graduate service fee. Management was evasive at best. It’s clear they do not want to discuss our key priorities for this contract until they can be sure the incredible momentum we’ve built up over the past seven months is starting to diminish.

We are at a truly pivotal moment in bargaining. As such, we want to give the membership an in-depth update of where we stand in the bargaining process and invite everyone to join us at the upcoming membership meeting on June 8 from 4-6p.m., which will take place over Zoom (register here). Below you’ll find a summary of where we are in bargaining: what agreements we’ve reached, what’s still on the table, and what lies ahead in the next few months. Read on for a detailed deep dive into the current state of bargaining; and join us at the membership meeting and at the bargaining table (once we secure dates for our next sessions) to ensure the contract we win is the contract graduate workers need and deserve. After all, UMass only works because WE do!

*** IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT STIPEND INCREASES: Many GSEs have reached out to us over the last several weeks asking if they should sign GFAFs with the old GEO minimum rate of $30.33 on them while the contract is still being negotiated. Signing your contract now has no consequences, and an updated pay rate will be reflected in the fall. This has been the past practice for GEO, though normally offers explicitly state that the rate will change. Some departments may assign you a new GFAF to reflect the change, but all grad workers will receive a raise in accordance with the results of collective bargaining (and anyone who doesn’t receive a new contract but wants one may request it from the department directly).***

Tentative agreements

We have reached tentative agreements on several proposals, which means that the committee and the university have come to an agreement but the language itself has not yet been ratified by the membership.

  • Article 3 – GEO Security

    • We updated this article to reflect current laws.

  • Article 4 – Time off for GEO Business

    • The University agreed to fund another full-time (20h/week) GEO officer position. This increases our capacity to organize, mobilize, and enforce our contract. The position will allow more GEO members to get involved in leadership and to take ownership of the day-to-day functioning of the union. What this new officer does (and who is elected to the role) is something the rank-and-file of GEO will determine democratically after our contract is ratified.

  • Article 30: Health and Safety

    • No worker will be disciplined or discharged for refusing to work in unsafe conditions. This was implicit in the contract before, but in light of the pandemic it is important to make this as explicit as possible given the University’s penchant for making unilateral and unlawful decisions when it comes to changing policies governing the workplace, such as lifting the mask mandate.

    • Any required PPE and safety equipment will be provided and paid for by the University.

    • Building on a big equity win from the last bargaining cycle, we made sure workers’ right to access and use bathrooms in accordance with their gender identity can not be contested by the university.

  • Article 39 – Additional Time Off:

    • We secured Juneteenth as a paid holiday for GSEs;

    • Additional time off may be used to include illness or injury of the employee or family member, observance of religious holidays that are not University holidays, bereavement, jury duty, or to attend immigration appointments or hearings for the employee or an immediate family member; and

    • A bank of leave for immigration proceedings or bereavement leave has been created in the event a graduate student employee uses up the rest of their paid time off.

  • Article 40 – Family Issues:

    • A big win and a first for GEO, we have incorporated new language guaranteeing graduate workers access to lactation spaces on campus. This win is not only a major victory for GEO; it benefits everyone across campus and has been a long time in the making!

  • Article 45: Family and Medical Leave

    • The waiting period for taking FMLA leave has been reduced from 4 months to 2 months.

Making Progress

We are close to agreeing on several other proposals, some of which we expect to agree on in the next few weeks:

  • Article 5 – Access to Campus

    • GEO will get a guaranteed space to hold the benefits fair every year, eliminating the back and forth between admin and GEO leadership that has ensued at the beginning of August for the past several years about where to house the orientation.

  • Article 12 – GEO Orientation:

    • GEO will get increased time to speak at new student orientations.

    • We have also successfully stopped management from making our union orientations optional—a change that they argued was a “minor update” to reflect new hiring practices but would have majorly limited our ability to interact with incoming grad student workers and thus seriously weakened our union.

  • Article 35 – Health Fees

    • The university has agreed to increase the amount of money they pay into the Health and Welfare Trust for childcare reimbursements by $100,000—a victory for grad student parents who have suffered during the pandemic as the cost of childcare has skyrocketed.

What we’re still fighting for:

There remain a number of proposals that GEO and the university disagree over and about which we are actively having discussions, both at the bargaining table and internally at bargaining committee meetings and in consultation with GEO members.

  • Article 1 and 2 – Recognition and Definitions

    • This round of bargaining, the University has indicated their willingness to work with GEO to make sure non-working fellows are finally officially included in the union. However, they have taken a hard line at the table: only NWFs who receive fellowships equating to the equivalent salary of a half-time (10 hours per week, 19 weeks) GEO assistantship will be recognized as “without-salary” GEO members.

    • GEO, meanwhile, has made our position very clear—include all non-working fellows in the union!

  • Article 15 – Non-Discrimination

    • The University has disagreed with our proposal to include caste as a protected category under this article because university policy doesn’t currently include “caste” and they would rather wait to change that policy than take the simple step that would protect our members now from abuse and mistreatment in the workplace.

    • Article 18 – Sexual Harassment

      • University proposal: Make all GSEs mandatory reporters and incorporate the policy on consensual relationships into the contract.

      • Our position: These are anti-feminist, anti-queer, and anti-worker proposals that harm survivors more than they help. Every other union on campus has already rejected this same contract language; GEO is very much inclined to follow suit.

    • Article 19 – Harassment

      • The university’s proposals narrow our ability to combat workplace (and academic) harassment per the contract. They want to take away our ability to engage in impact bargaining over changes to university policies; remove any mention of “academic environment” from the current contract language; and overall narrow the definition of harassment in the contract to only the most “egregious” types of conduct. GEO has no inclination to accept these cuts, especially not in an atmosphere in which more workers are being harassed and targeted than ever before—especially international grad students and Black and Brown GEO members.

      • GEO continues to fight for additional language that strengthens our ability to hold the university accountable for allowing our members to be targeted by racist mass emails, graffiti and other similar harassments.

    • Article 25 – Second Job:

      • The University wants to change language protecting grad workers’ right to hold more than one job so that now, the home department can decide whether or not a grad may hold a second position. This effectively inverts the original provision and makes it so that graduate students don’t have the right to seek assistantships in other departments—which, like many of the university’s proposals, targets international students and the most vulnerable members of GEO who cannot survive on 10-hour assistantships.

    • Article 38 – Vacation

      • After our enormous win in the vacation arbitration, as well as a grievance in 2019 that led to vacation payouts for graduate employees in Residential Life, the university is seeking to eliminate language that assures graduate workers who are unable to take vacation can receive a payout for unused time. The university wants to make the payout contingent on an unreasonable denial of vacation; but GEO’s position is and has been that this language exists to benefit RAs who simply are unable to take vacation sometimes without jeopardizing their labwork or active experiments.

Economics

We have only barely begun discussing economics, both for procedural reasons—economics are usually the last thing the parties come to a tentative agreement on in collective bargaining—and because the university has been unwilling to engage seriously with our proposals for stipend increases and fee removal. This is why your participation is so important; when the members come to the table the university talks.

  • Article 32 – Stipends:

    • GEO proposal: 10.5% wage increase—3.5% increase for each year of the contract—plus full retroactivity for all grad workers employed during the life of the contract.

    • University proposal: 6.64% one-time raise for the next academic year, equivalent to 2.5%, 2%, and 2% raises for each year across the life of the contract. No retroactive pay, but a lump sum for grad employees still on payroll as of Fall 2022. This would mean grad workers who kept this institution afloat during the pandemic, when we initially were supposed to bargain this contract, would receive nothing if they graduated in the last several years.

  • Article 33 – Tuition Credit:

    • Union proposal: We should receive a waiver for the Engineering and Grad service fees the same way we receive a tuition waiver.

    • University proposal: they have rejected this proposal out of hand.

  • Article 35 – Health Fees:

    • GEO proposal: In addition to increases to childcare, we have proposed a 5.8% increase in the amount the university pays into the Health and Welfare Trust to ensure that benefits like free dental, free vision, and the wellness reimbursement do not run up too great a deficit for the Trust.

    • University proposal: NO increases to HWT contributions other than the childcare mentioned above; at the table, they suggested it was perfectly fine to run the fund at a deficit, but in practice this would mean risking having to cut the benefits funded by the trust in the medium term.

TL;DR: We’re making a lot of progress at the table, but we still have a fight ahead of us, and we need every single GEO member to join us as part of that fight. Many of you are withering under devastating fees and inadequate wages, and now is the time to bring your realities directly to the university.

As always, if you would like more information please feel free to come to our weekly meetings or send us an email at bargaining. And join us at the special membership meeting on June 8 on Zoom; register here!

In Solidarity,

GEO Bargaining Committee

Published by GEO