[Peace] GEO to strike Monday

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Graduate students do the heavy lifting of the teaching and research 
programs.
They teach the classes, answer the questions, grade the tests and homework.
They bleed, weigh, and necropsy the pigs, they count the bugs, make the 
slides,
run the machines,  enter the data, and write the papers.

The tenured professors and administrators are then forced to be absent 
gor weeks at a time, draw the big salaries, have the expense accounts, 
take the trips to New Zealand, make the speeches, have lucrative 
consulting jobs on the side, and get the glory.  It's big-time stress 
for our big-ticket faculty and administrator to do all that, but someone 
has to.  After all, that's why they make the big bucks.  Somebody has 
gotta do it.

The most insulting thing about the University welshing on the tuition 
waivers is that the out-of -pocket cost of providing the extra chairs 
for those graduate students is practically nil in most cases.


On 11/15/2009 9:28 AM, Ricky Baldwin wrote:
> According to the GEO Facebook 
> <http://www.facebook.com/pages/GEO/171984109397?ref=mf> page, no 
> agreement was reached last night and the strike committee voted early 
> this morning to walk out over tuition waivers.
>
> Tuition waivers are, of course, important because if a graduate 
> employee has to pay tuition in order to work at UIUC, it effectively 
> wipes out the miserly pay that most of them receive.  The UI had been 
> offering to pay grad employees IN-KIND (meal tickets, housing) instead 
> of money.
>
> The same University that wasted millions on the research park, 
> millions on the "Global Campus" boondoggle, heaps of cash on sky-boxes 
> and bonuses for disgraced administrators (and a nice, fat paycheck 
> after resignation) -- and a  million bucks on scholarships and 
> specially created jobs for well-connected children and on attorneys' 
> fees during the investigation alone -- says they can't afford to keep 
> its obligations to the LOWEST PAID workers at the UI, who teach almost 
> a fourth of its classes?
>
> I may have been born at night, but it wasn't last night.
>
> The UI also waited until the contract expired to start bargaining.  So 
> this crisis is of their making (in case we hadn't noticed that there's 
> profound mismanagement at the UI).
>
> Picket lines begin at 8am Monday morning around Quad buildings.  GEO 
> will have strike captains there in charge.  Soldarity armbands are 
> available for workers who have no-strike clauses in their contracts.  
> "GEO Solidarity" buttons are also available.
>
> Community support is very important to sending a strong message to 
> this land-grant institution that we expect some responsibility for our 
> public trust, to achieving justice, and to making this strike the 
> shortest, most successful action it can be.
>
> See you there!
>
> In Solidarity,
> Ricky
>
> "Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peace mailing list
> Peace at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace
>    

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace/attachments/20091115/778d6ade/attachment.html