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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Labor |
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GEO's First Contract with UIUC Overwhelmingly Approved by Membership |
Current rating: 0 |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
02 Aug 2004
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Voting 98% in favor, GEO members have given a solid and enthusiastic endorsement to their recently negotiated first contract with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. |
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Voting 98% in favor, GEO members have given a solid and enthusiastic endorsement to their recently negotiated first contract with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While the vote was held during the summer, when many graduate employees are out of town, more than 50% of the GEO membership was able to vote despite the University's pressure to rapidly ratify the recently negotiated contract that directly covers some 2,500 graduate employees in the bargaining unit. It's economic benefits also apply to thousands of other working graduate students who have yet to be recognized as part of the bargaining unit by the University.
Voting was conducted by ballot box, mail, and via the internet. The secret ballots were counted by an inter-faith group of local ministers. The results were announced at 8pm at the GEO's offices in the University YMCA at 1001 S. Wright St., Champaign, IL.
Bryan Nicholson, the GEO's spokesperson, acknowledged the historic nature of the vote as a culmination of more than 10 years of organizing by thousands of graduate employees via "hundreds" of work actions, rallies, and pickets, as well as one sit-in. The contract provides for a 3% raise in each of its three years, a major cut in fees, and a strong grievance procedure that puts the GEO on an equal footing with other, traditionally-recognized unions at the University.
With the ratification by the GEO, the only remaining hurdle for the contract to go into effect is its approval by the UI Board of Trustees. This is considered a pro-forma event, since there is little doubt that the University's negotiating team was given direction by the BoT in coming to terms with the Union.
The GEO will continue to aggresively organize, signing up new members from among the hundreds of incoming graduate employees in this year's new class of graduate students, as well as bringing on board fencesitters who have put off joining the GEO because they thought a contract would never come to pass. Based on the positive response of graduate employees in the short time since the signing of the contract, it is expected that the union's membership will grow quickly in the next few months. Since the contract provides for "fair share" it is in the best interest of every graduate employee, who will be paying dues in any case, to join the union and make their voices heard by joining with those of the many others who make up the Graduate Employees' Organization, IFT/AFTLocal 6300. |
See also:
http://www.shout.net/~geo/
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This work licensed under a
Creative Commons license. |
Comments
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Re: GEO's First Contract with UIUC Overwhelmingly Approved by Membership |
by JK
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
03 Aug 2004
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Uninformed people who post on this site, with Jack Ryan sitting atop the heap, may try to lead readers astray with typically ignorant antiunion screed. The "double-digit increase in their tuition next year," according to Jack Ryan's response to ML's post, is somehow connected to GEO's successfully bargained contract with the University of Illinois.
Yet according to Provost Richard Herman, as quoted in the Daily Illini in its November 10, 2003 issue--note the date--"The tuition increases have not made up for the decline in state funding over the past 25 years," Herman said. "We need alternative funding sources, so we've asked the students to help." He said state funding has decreased from about 40 percent to about 21 percent over the past 25 years. Herman said the University looked at its needs and its cuts over the past two years, such as cuts in salary increases, funding, courses offered, discussion sections and faculty. Joe Kaylen, committee member and a senior in business, said the committee focused on certain University needs such as library funding and faculty retention while weighing the benefits of a tuition increase.
"This tuition increase won't make us competitive," Kaylen said. "But it will keep us from falling further behind in salary competitiveness."
The Urbana-Champaign campus currently is ranked 20th out of 21 schools as far as salary competitiveness in its Illinois Board of Higher Education peer group. The University hopes to improve its salary ranking by one or two positions with revenue from the tuition increase."
Several themes here warrant closer scrutiny than Jack Ryan and other purveyors of antiunion propaganda can afford. The first is the date of the article and the proposed tuition increases--last November, in the middle of contract negotiations--which is by no means the first discussion that the University has initiated regarding possible tuition increases. These discussions, as KNOWLEDGEABLE readers know, predate both the conclusion of contract negotiations with the University, and in some cases the official recognition of the GEO as the representative organization of teaching assistants at the University. To blame the GEO and its contract with the University for tuition increases that the University has considered for a few years is to toss out a red herring that defies logic and credulity.
Also, the Provost states in the article that the proposed tuition increases were responses to gradual but significant reductions over the last quarter century in state funding for higher education. How the GEO contract is responsible for this is anyone's guess. Any not-so-bright ideas, Jack Ryan?
Additionally, the tuition increases were intended to restore cuts in several crucial areas, affecting "salary increases, funding, courses offered, discussion sections and faculty," as well as the salary competitiveness of the faculty and staff of the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system. Not only are teaching assistants not bilking the University, they, along with professors and staff, are trying to keep their salaries at this prestigious University competitive with other colleges. Salary competitiveness is a factor that improves the quality of education by helping to attract highly qualified candidates and potential graduate students, thus enhancing the quality of undergraduate and graduate education.
This is exactly why I posted a few weeks ago that we as progressives need to continue to coalesce ideologically and organizationally in order to move beyond the stale right-wing antiunion mantras that, in typically knee-jerk fashion, blame modestly remunerated graduate student teaching assistants post facto for tuition increases that the University itself, with which the GEO bargained in good faith, did not attribute to the GEO. This is why this site, with well-informed people such as ML and many others posting regularly, is an important instrument for this much-needed convergence on matters relating to yet extending beyond the state of labor. The momentum keeps rolling on in our favor. Let's keep the ball rolling.
GEO! GEO! GEO! GEO! GEO! GEO! GEO! |
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Re: GEO's First Contract with UIUC Overwhelmingly Approved by Membership |
by JK
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
03 Aug 2004
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For the record, I ascribed the term "uninformed" to Jack Ryan's post in order to accurately characterize it not him, for it strongly implied that the GEO's reaching a contract agreement with the University were somehow responsible for a tuition increase. Anyone who has paid any attention to the University's ongoing discussions regarding tuition increases knows that these discussions predate GEO-University contract negotiations. Indeed, as the article which I cited states, the University attributes the tuition increases to a variety of reasons, none of which involved the GEO's contract or the negotiations involved in achieving it. I stand by my referring to his implication as "uninformed," not because I disagree with his "premise" or his comments although I certainly do, but because an informed post would have more fully understood the wide-ranging contexts in which the University has deliberated tuition increases.
Also, isn't it funny to hear right-wingers whine about unions' supposedly breaching the rights of their members by making political contributions, when these same critics routinely fail to mention that corporations never poll their employees about whether they should lobby governments about procuring tax breaks--whether or not they provide domestic jobs--about easing pesky environmental and safety regulations, about obstructing legislation easing the path of workers to form unions without employer harassment--which is rampant, according to experts such as Kate Bronfenbrenner-- et cetera?
I also find it funny that right-wingers caterwaul about the alleged need for balancing portrayals about union corruption on this website, yet this site is geared toward providing alternatives to mainstream news which does discuss examples of alleged union corruption. I myself can recall various examples of unions' failures to foster democracy among their ranks, or examples of outright corruption or ties to organized crime. Yet these examples have nothing to do with the posts which I have read on this site. More importantly, as a member of the labor movement for nearly sixteen years, my experience, which with all due humility is not inconsiderable, is that such cases of unions gone awry is by far the exception and by no means the rule. Unions and their members face strong and threatening challenges to their status and sometimes their very existence. What unions and their members do and want to do about such challenges is what I and others feel is most worthy of our attention.
Lastly, a cursory glancing around this website would reveal more nuanced positions that I have stated on the status of graduate students as employees. See for example my posts under the NLRB post. I see that Jack Ryan has tried to add the subtle "full time" distinction to his already untenable argument that graduate students are not employees since they are, according to him, "by defnition" students. I won't rehash my previous arguments here, which certainly still apply to Jack Ryan's mush, but would add this. The distinction of full time rather than part time is irrelevant regarding the rights of employees to unionize. Grocery workers, restaurant workers, hospital workers, nursing home workers, and many thousands and thousands of others can form and have formed their own unions as part-time and full-time employees.
Although I find these exercises in refuting Jack Ryan's myths and misconceptions useful in some ways, we must be careful not to let them distract us from the bigger picture that most of us who read and post on this wonderful website share, which entails a commitment to positive social change, greater social equality, and a safer and more tolerant world. This is by no means news to most of us, but my intent in involving myself in these "I'm-right, you're-wrong" sessions extends beyond merely refuting right-wing propaganda, and hopefully into the realm of addressing these bigger goals, and how best to achieve them. I know that I always fall short, but I refuse to believe that our path to these goals is asymptotic. We CAN reach them, and unions, though by no means perfect institutions, have done much more to attain rather than to obstruct these goals. I stand by that, and I'm glad to know I'm not alone. |
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Re: GEO's First Contract with UIUC Overwhelmingly Approved by Membership |
by JK
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
03 Aug 2004
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I stand corrected. It was late last night, and I did in fact refer to Jack Ryan as uninformed. I stand by that too, certainly on this issue. He AND his post are uninformed. My bad. Note to self: don't post after midnight... |
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Re: GEO's First Contract with UIUC Overwhelmingly Approved by Membership |
by Mink!
mink (nospam) tcp.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
03 Aug 2004
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Congratulations to the GEO! It has indeed been a hard battle won. Such an overwhelming ratification, too!
In particular it's great that you will have a standard performance review process with the opportunity for input. So many instances of screwage I've seen over the years will be so much harder to continue with that. Good going!
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Re: GEO's First Contract with UIUC Overwhelmingly Approved by Membership |
by JK
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
04 Aug 2004
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Mink:
Thanks for the kind words. The contract is a strong improvement in many regards, including stronger protections for international students, a detailed grievance procedure to resolve disputes that includes strong Weingarten rights' protections (ensuring the rights of union representation in meetings in which there is a possibility of discipline), and other economic and non-economic improvements.
Without the membership's sticking together, rallying together, and acting together for these terms, we simply would not have achieved nearly as good a contract, or in a worst-case scenario a contract at all. In this antiunion era, in which employers routinely impede or delay bargaining, or simply refuse to bargain in good faith, this contract is definitely a strong start for the GEO.
Thanks again. Solidarity. |
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