[Peace] Legal strategy to break GEO Union

[Karen Aram]

ADMINISTRATION REVEALS NEW LEGAL STRATEGY TO BUST GEO


At this session, the administration revealed their plans to terminate full tuition waiver protections and bust our Union. The administration argues that our tuition waivers are a permissive subject of bargaining, meaning that we legally cannot strike over it. Our position is that, as compensation, tuition waivers are a mandatory subject of bargaining and legal to strike over, a position upheld by two separate legally binding arbitration decisions. The administration wants to make it so that they can re-designate any program to self-supporting, which means that both current and incoming graduate students could lose access to tuition waiver generating appointments, even if they do the work of  a TA or GA. If members are ineligible for tuition waivers, they won’t be able to attend school here. Furthermore, as tuition waiver generating appointments disappear from many departments, we’ll be forced to compete over the limited number of waiver-generating positions in the small number of departments that offer them. Not only will this make graduate education unaffordable, but it means that fewer graduate employees will be legally protected by GEO’s contract, as the Administration’s position is that only employees with tuition waivers are members of our bargaining unit. In the long term, this will decimate individual graduate programs: departments will only be able to recruit those who can afford to pay tuition rather than seeking out the best students.  With fewer graduate students on campus and fewer positions covered by the contract, GEO will go extinct.


Publically, the administration is claiming that the GEO is attempting to prevent them from creating new programs. The GEO recognizes that the administration has the right to create new programs. However, as long as a graduate employee performs bargaining unit work, then that graduate employee MUST be paid their full compensation under the terms of our contract, including a tuition waiver.


What this means is that we’re no longer just fighting for fair compensation and working conditions: we’re fighting for the life of our Union, our ability to attend grad school, the future of our departments, and the future of higher education.


Here is a link to the university administration’s proposal<https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8G1e8v8ld_acG4xUG5iUEE2T2s> from 30th Jan. Their proposed tuition waiver side letter language has not changed since then.  We are seeking the same tuition waiver side letter language as our last contract, which can be found at uigeo.org<http://uigeo.org>.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace/attachments/20180208/37a2a1a8/attachment-0001.html>