For Immediate Release
Press Contact: Amir Fleischmann (he/him); contractchair@geo3550.org
Following a Winter recess during which a contractual deadline for a tentative agreement passed, the Graduate Employees’ Organization (AFT-MI Local 3550) has filed Unfair Labor Practice charges against the University of Michigan for failing to bargain in good faith.
State law requires the University to provide information related to wages, benefits, and other working conditions in order to facilitate contract negotiations, but the University has refused for months to share data on benefits (including healthcare, childcare, and reimbursements for immigration fees) and workplace safety (including COVID testing, prevention and remediation of harassment and discrimination, and campus policing).
The University also disregarded its legal duty to bargain with GEO over working conditions when it unilaterally changed its COVID policies on February 20, 2023. Those changes immediately narrowed U-M’s COVID vaccination policy to apply only to students living in University housing and employees working in clinical settings, and revealed plans to shut down the Community Sampling and Tracking Program at the end of May. The University had not mentioned these issues at the bargaining table despite the fact that GEO and U-M have been discussing COVID policy since negotiations began on November 17, 2022. U-M gave the union only 42 minutes’ advance notice of these policy changes.
“Instead of working collaboratively to solve problems, the University has undermined and stalled negotiations for months, going so far as to break the law,” said Jared Eno, president of GEO. “Meanwhile, grad workers are selling their plasma, skipping meals, waiting inordinate amounts of time for gender-affirming care, and struggling to escape abusive supervisors. Enough is enough. It’s time for the University to take these contract negotiations seriously and provide grad workers with a fair contract.”
The legal charges come on the heels of a contractual March 1, 2023 deadline for a tentative agreement that the University made no serious effort to honor. U-M spent the first two months of bargaining attempting to shut grad workers out of their own contract negotiations, taking the highly unusual step of calling in a state mediator before U-M had passed or responded to a single substantive proposal. Eventually conceding its position on logistics, U-M’s engagement since then has largely been limited to striking out GEO’s proposals. The University also proposed an effective pay cut, despite the fact that U-M already pays grad workers $14,500 less than a living wage. The move provoked outrage across campus, including a rare joint letter in support of GEO from Rackham Student Government (RSG), Students of Color at Rackham (SCOR), and Graduate Rackham International (GRIN). The University eventually admitted that it had not considered how grad workers would live under their wage proposal.
The RSG/SCOR/GRIN joint letter reads in part, “As passionate contributors to the excellence of this institution, we are incredibly disappointed by this disrespectful and inhumane [salary] proposal and its implication on our perceived worth by AHR. We cannot be silent while the administration enjoys raises that reflect economic conditions, while our salary falls behind a living wage and fails to meet the baseline rate of inflation, in the name of history rather than data. Plain and simple, this is an embarrassment.”
To support grad workers’ in their negotiations for affordability and dignity, sign GEO’s open letter at bit.ly/SupportGEO.
###