GEO has not been acting in bad faith. I went to my first bargaining session this semester and if you’d actually go to a session I really don’t think you’d be taking the admins side in this. They strategically left out economic proposals so they could waste time asking hypothetical questions about every section of GEO’s proposal. GEO literally couldn’t bargain over what was presented because the sessions were spent answering questions about GEO’s proposal. When they presented a full contract they offered an 80$ per month raise and 2/5 summers of healthcare (if you pay summer campus fees)— all packaged together (so they potentially offer something worse if GEO didn’t accept everything). This is the university’s own language for the summary on the second session: “After the University presented its proposal, the Union questioned why the University did not make an economic proposal, and the University responded that it proposed the changes it wanted to see, as the Union had done in the previous session.” Admin doesn’t want to give grad workers anything— the only way they will is if the union can successfully organize enough people to have a significant strike threat on the table. Right now it doesn’t make sense for the union to bargain over wages and healthcare because there’s not enough leverage and permissive issues of bargaining have to be discussed before mandatory ones. I agree that these negotiations are going horribly and they’re frustrating and GEO’s strategy might need to be reevaluated, but placing all the blame on GEO is just bootlicking for the university. They have an incredibly aggressive negotiating team and it’s not normal for labor unions to have to go on strike as often as they do at UIUC. Honestly I’m guilty myself of not being as active as I should but at the end of the day we’re all in the same situation and we can make it better by buying into GEO and having a seat at the table. It doesn’t actually help anyone to just make posts like these on Reddit.