[This is not a real-time post. It is a copy of an email sent to GEO members on Wednesday 13 April 2020 and has been posted here for archival continuity.
Trying our best to have updates to the website in real time, stay tuned]
On Friday, April 10th, GEO met with University management to hear their response to our proposals. Over the past few weeks, the Union handed four proposals to them to address the impact of the pandemic on GEO members: Summer Pay (bring all grad students up to 20 hr/week RAships over the summer); Fall Job Security (keep the number of appointments for Fall same as what exists right now); Housing Security and rent waivers for North Village and Lincoln (for whom UMass is landlord); Vacation Payouts (compensation for work done during Spring Break when a lot of us take our time off). Management response was utterly unsatisfactory: they gave us nothing we asked for. We need to escalate this fight NOW.
HOW YOU CAN TAKE ACTION:
GEO Impact Bargaining was treated as a joke by the University, but that doesn’t mean that our demands are lost; if anything, the fight is just beginning. We must take action by all means necessary. A coalition of grad student workers at UMass Amherst has been working very hard in the last several days, and has produced a set of demands that we need to fight for together! We must take matters into our own hands. Please read the TWO petitions linked below, sign BOTH, and share them as widely as you possibly can! Anyone can sign! The total number of grad students is about 6000. Make sure you share this with EVERYONE you know from UMass so we reach everyone, not just GEO members!
- To sign the Coalition Demands: https://cutt.ly/gradstudentdemands
- To sign the Demands of International Grad Students https://bit.ly/geointsign
- To add a GEO bargaining frame to your Facebook profile pic, click here
- To organize and strategize with other rank-and-file GEO members on Slack, click here
DRIVE PAST SUBBASWAMY’S HOUSE Sunday 3pm [Please respond GOING to this Facebook Event]
Chancellor Subbaswamy needs to be reminded that UMass Works Because We Do! Calling all UMass grad students and friends! Come together and Drive Past his house HORNS BLARING to demand everything on the petitions, starting with Summer Pay! Details about logistics coming soon.
- Management refused us Summer Pay even though for most of us, the ability to have a roof over our heads and put food on the table is completely dependent on summer funding. In an incredible display of bad faith, they flat-out refused to even counter our proposal. Their lead negotiator, Michael Eagan, who earns $195,266 a year, suggested that “the most marginalized” graduate students apply for a one-time payout from an existing hardship fund previously allocated for undergrads, now available to grad students as well. They had no answers to questions from members about this fund: how much money is in it, or how it could suddenly be stretched to accommodate all undergraduate and graduate students in need. Pitting graduate students against undergraduates to compete for limited funding is unacceptable, and our 70 plus members at the bargaining table were pretty pissed off at this suggestion.
- Management refused us Job Security, when all we asked for was reassurance that UMass will not cut graduate positions in the name of austerity. Despite Jeff Podos admitting that the University would not run without the work of graduate students, they refused to commit to no cuts to appointments or reappointments. Graduate workers should not bear the brunt of economic distress in the face of this pandemic, nor should we be in danger of losing access to income, housing, health insurance and benefits during this dangerous time. Most of us face incredible economic precarity under normal conditions, stretching Fall and Spring paychecks to cover the summer, or finding other jobs to supplement our income, or finding sublets to reduce outlay. In a few short weeks, most of our contracts with UMass end, leaving us with no means to survive the unemployed summer.
- Management refused to make any commitments towards grad students for whom the University is landlord and collecting rent during a pandemic, while refusing to fairly pay us for our work over spring or summer. We were merely instructed to talk to Student Affairs and Campus Life as the appropriate channel. The “appropriate channels,” have thus far proven fruitless for Lincoln residents who still have instructions to move out by June 1st. For North Village residents, many of whom are international student families hit particularly hard by border closures and travel stoppages, moving during a period of income loss will be impossible – many students, domestic and international, are already paying double rent, because they are not in the area, and cannot break their lease.
- The only offer in response to these four Union proposals was an insultingly small vacation payout only for TAs/TOs: 25% of Spring Break wages. Even that comes with a preference that grad student workers take their vacation time sometime between now and the end of the semester instead. Let’s break that down at $30.33 an hour: for 20hr employees, that’s $150; for 10hr, that’s $75, and so on. That’s how little UMass thinks our labour is worth.
- Did you know UMass Amherst is set to receive $18 million [you can search & find it in that list] as part of an initial windfall of state relief funding, half of which is earmarked as a minimum for emergency student financial aid? Michael Eagan claimed to be unaware of this funding. His team of University representatives have been bargaining away their responsibility to graduate student workers. The University’s expanding administrative class includes some of the top earners in the state, with no concern about job security or cuts. What about the rest of us? The University has the power to ease economic distress for hundreds of graduate student workers right now. And yet, they cite pandemic-related economic insecurity for the UMass Amherst budget as a reason not to give us summer pay. There is no plan to slow or halt displacement, demolition and some very expensive and non-essential future construction on these two graduate student communities. Eagen wasted the time of GEO members being annoyed about the Union rejecting his ground rules, and then went on to tone-police angry and concerned folks on our side who expressed their legitimate frustration.
Solidarity! See you online on Facebook, Slack,
and in person at Subbaswamy’s house very soon!
