Dear Fellow GEO Members,
Here is where we are: last spring, we extended our contract to 2017. For those of us who sat at the table and attended the numerous emergency General Membership Meetings leading up to our final agreement, we know that almost didn’t happen. We voted to walk away from the table because the proposals the University was making were, to be frank, offensive. But once we showed our strength and our determination to keep a strong contract, they came back and caved on a lot of their most troubling demands, like cutting many GSI salaries by 20% and getting rid of our job security. So we not only got a contract extension, we got a preview of what University anticipates will happen under the so-called “Right to Work” laws passed last year, and administrators are already planning how they’d like to take advantage of these new laws that make it harder for unions to function. They envision GSI positions with lower pay, no job security whatsoever, and no healthcare for those on the Flint and Dearborn campuses. And those are just the proposals that came up in the relatively limited scope of this renegotiation.
We also got a couple of other incredibly valuable things out of the process of bargaining, aside from that preview of a bad movie none of us ever want to see: we got time to get organized, a reminder of how it feels to win, and a reminder that we win when we work together and believe in our worth.
Working together is going to be more important than ever starting in our next contract. Right to Work, or more accurately Right to Work For Less, will go into effect. What is RTW? Basically, it’s a law passed last year that says that unions have to represent everyone in the bargaining unit even if they make no contributions whatsoever to the effort and cost of organizing and running a union. That means that starting in 2017, we won’t be asking our colleagues to choose either “member” or “service fee payer” when they start working here. We’ll be asking them to choose between becoming a member or paying nothing, while still getting all the benefits. That’s the jist of it, but as you probably have more questions, GEO is going to be making an effort to provide more information about the impact of Right to Work during our communications this year.
What we do need to do now is get ready. We need to figure out how to explain what GEO is to people who have never been in a union that works as democratically as GEO does and that delivers on the promise of improving our working conditions and lives in every single contract. Most of them also will have never been through a contract negotiation, and so might not have experienced the sharp learning curve that comes when you hear the University propose lower pay and worse benefits. Without these experiences, people who will join a union for a union’s sake are relatively few. And why should they? A union is as a union does, and GEO has done and will do great things. We need to work together to figure out how to make GEO’s value visible in every department, and not just in contract years, because by our next contract we will need to be more organized than ever if we want fair working conditions and compensation.
So, we’ve got the time, the only question is, how are we going to get ready? At this year’s first GMM, members brainstormed together to identify obstacles we need to overcome, including apathy, jargon that doesn’t help people understand what a union is, and in the long run, getting rid of laws that have proven to lower wages and decrease benefits. As we saw in crystal clear fashion last spring, GEO works when we all decide what we’ll do together, so that’s what I’m asking GEO members to do: be a part of the conversation about what GEO means to you and how we can get the word out to get organized for our future.
In solidarity,
Liz Rodrigues
English Language & Literature
GEO President 2013-14
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What is “Right to Work”?
Simply put, “Right to Work” is the name given to state laws that make it so employees are not required to join a union as a condition of retaining a job. In other words, a worker represented by a union has the option of paying or not paying union dues, even though the union is legally required to represent all workers whether or not they pay dues. Michigan passed its own set of “Right to Work” laws in December of 2012. GEO is protected from them until our current contract expires in 2017.
Why is “Right to Work” a problem? These laws target the finances of unions. Knowing that many workers will not pay dues if they don’t have to, legislators pass these laws with the hopes that unions will have less money to work with while being required to operate at the same level. Gradually, the union becomes weaker, less able to win good wages or benefits for its members, and as a result, fewer people join, ultimately eliminating the union or making it little more than a symbolic entity.
Proponents of these laws gave them their positive-sounding and misleading name. “Right to Work” laws have nothing to do with job creation or hiring practices. They simply prevent people from paying money to a union which fights for their wages and benefits and represents them in grievances. Would you say the same thing about having the “Right to Work Out” by not paying a gym membership but using the facilities? Make no mistake, “Right to Work” laws were devised with two aims: to make unions weaker in the workplace, and to pit workers against each other.
But these laws only have power over unions that are poorly organized and have little loyalty amongst their members. If incoming GSIs and GSSAs know that their wages and healthcare are protected by a union contract that their fellow graduate students have been defending and improving since 1975, they will understand why it is important to pay union dues. Talking to other grad employees about GEO is the most important thing you can do to help your union! Email the Organizing Committee at organizing@geo3550.org to be paired with a staff organizer who will help you talk to other grad employees.
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