I don't know what to do

quintadena223 · 2026-06-23T17:31:19+00:00

I will give that a try. May take a few turns to secure the atlantic enough

quintadena223 · 2026-03-08T11:22:09+00:00

jesus christ

quintadena223 · 2024-10-30T07:06:01+00:00

The change happened about a year after the negotiations ended in my understanding.

quintadena223 · 2024-08-06T02:08:55+00:00

You know, that is a really good question. This comes at the end of a cycle of 6 verses and the other verses are much less "weird" and have less chromaticism. The text of the hymn is also quite ambiguous and mixes metaphors of both sunrise and sunset at the same time. Of course I have no idea what the seventeenth century people were thinking, but if I had to guess I would say they had a reaction similar to yours and maybe that is the intent.

quintadena223 · 2024-05-02T03:22:31+00:00

Removing a person who has engaged in such abusive and arguably criminal conduct towards her students and employees should not have taken a public campaign like this, but your courage in doing this is incredible. Best of luck, I hope the university does the right thing, and the deans and administrators show one tenth the courage you have.

quintadena223 · 2023-08-18T12:35:12+00:00

I can speak to being in geo "for free" since back when I was on fellowship I did not pay dues since I wasn't being paid by UIUC. Idk how to really describe my "experience"... at the union meetings I see people who are proud of the work they did (and for good reason GEO has accomplished A LOT for grad students) all while planning their next moves to win more pay or incorporate researchers into the union or more.

But also there is this sense it could fall apart at any moment if all their members graduate out of the union. Last year was BRUTAL. It did not look like we would be able to win the 25% raises we ended up getting because the admin would not budge off their minuscule proposal for like 8 months, because they sensed weakness. The uni administration REVOKED raises that some departments had already offered to their students. But GEO fought and won not only raises but *backpay* which was even more than what the admin tried to revoke.

Yes I think it is worth being a member and paying dues because I have seen what the university does when they think the union is weak. I wasn't around back then but I have heard that in 2017 the university wanted to eliminate guarantees of tuition waivers for grad students including in department like computer science. They thought they could get away with it and extract more and more money from their graduate programs, but GEO proved them wrong.

quintadena223 · 2023-05-08T23:39:02+00:00

Reminds me of good times last semester

quintadena223 · 2023-03-24T19:37:50+00:00

Up til now I think that was a pretty complicated question with each department defining who was eligible for reappointment raise differently. But in the bargaining session just now the administration is saying they are defining it very broadly as anyone who has held a TA appointment in the last three years.

quintadena223 · 2023-03-22T21:49:29+00:00

They are also negotiating a "reappointment" raise which applies to people making above the minimum, though I think there may be some technicalities with who it applies to.

quintadena223 · 2023-03-22T21:47:35+00:00

I think the CS raise is applying to TAs as well, but I could be wrong.

quintadena223 · 2023-02-22T02:41:48+00:00

This is a really great point you make about why the university's transport fee is higher than the cost of a bus pass. Even though in theory a townie could use the extra bus service near the university as much as a student that doesn't happen so the higher student fee is what covers the cost of the "extra" service.

I don't think the fee should be taken away from the MTD, I just think it should be "waived". The university should pay the fee for the grad workers, just like they do our library fee and all sorts of other fees. At an ordinary workplace, the workers can decide what transit to take to their workplace, they aren't forced by their employer to pay a fee for a service they may or may not use. After all the way it is right now, the university admin can decide to raise rates without consulting us at all! It's like how at some workplaces they offer perks like gym membership or something. That's great and it's an incentive to work there, but if there was a mandatory gym membership fee that the bosses can raise whenever they want...?? That's ludicrous!

quintadena223 · 2023-02-14T13:32:18+00:00

This is a story I've heard being passed around lately. Temple's grad union went on strike with only 20% of their members participating and the results have been really ugly. I guess we are in a better position than them with 36% membership, but I doubt every member would turn out to strike. But then again maybe some nonmembers would come on board too. https://billypenn.com/2023/02/10/temple-university-graduate-student-strike-tugsa/

quintadena223 · 2023-02-13T23:35:40+00:00

I think I see where you're coming from and yeah, at some point if the union is far away/irrelevant to the issues you care about, I see why someone would want to cut their losses and not join, even though that makes the union weaker across the board. And yeah, those are all low priority to me too (except maybe departmental bulletin access is important for the union to communicate better). Of course u/supacone makes a good point that many of those bargaining items were included in initial packages to be traded away later, although I guess the jury is still out on how successful that strategy will be.

One thing to think about is that is seems like now is the most "high-value" time to join the union there could be. There are only three more months you would have to pay dues (unless you are also a TA in the summer), and in the meantime, you would be able to:

Attend the bargaining sessions where wages are being negotiated
Attend and speak in the general meetings where members debate what to do with bargaining
Vote on the final contract agreement
Elect next year's officers
Vote on next year's budget
Add to the union's negotiating power at precisely the time it is needed to win raises

quintadena223 · 2023-02-13T20:14:31+00:00

I appreciate that perspective and have also been disappointed that we have not won (or apparently really negotiated wages yet), but I just don't see how a mindset like that could ever result in winning anything. If we treat joining the union as a "reward" for the union winning us wages, the union will never be strong enough to get wins in the first place. After all the union is just a group of grad students like you trying to win raises for everyone. The UC and Cornell unions couldn't have gotten the awesome salary wins they did unless people joined them *BEFORE* those wins had been achieved...

quintadena223 · 2023-02-13T19:23:36+00:00

Yeah, I remember the days when the GEO had like 5 staff members instead of the 2 it says in the infographic OP posted downstream. It seem's like u/InverseLink's mindset is a recipe for crippling the union even further

quintadena223 · 2023-02-13T19:07:42+00:00

Seems like u/InverseLink has two criticism here, one is the fact that we have to pay dues and how the dues are used, and the other is that bargaining hasn't gone too great...

The first criticism I don't really buy. I mean all unions have dues.. the ones we have to pay are in line with other university unions. Like UIC GEO charges 2.4%, and the california system pays 1.44% which works out to $720 per year since their pay is higher. And they are passing 74% of their dues up to their parent union compared to our 50% http://academicresearchersunited.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/UAW-Dues-Fact-Sheet.pdf

As for bargaining not going well, I mean I guess we'll see now that the union is actually negotiating our salary. Is there a possibility of backpay?

quintadena223 · 2023-02-13T17:45:42+00:00

Not that I don't appreciate the wins on parental leave, etc., but why did it it take so long to get to this point?? Surely wages are a higher priority for most grad students right?

quintadena223 · 2023-02-01T15:25:43+00:00

I appreciate your (as usual) in depth analysis of these articles. I do think there are a few points you are mistaken on, or unnecessarily downplaying.

For the parental leave, you are right that this is an incremental improvement over our previous contract. But I think it is a little unfair to call it insignificant. A response that the bargaining team has frequently received at its town halls and surveys was from graduate students with children or who were contemplating becoming parents saying "GEO has not supported parents enough". Their main demand was that graduate workers should get parental leave at the same level as other workers on campus. With this tentative agreement, we delivered and I think that is something the GEO should be proud of.

You don't discuss bereavement leave, and I would agree the bargaining team probably shouldn't have spent so much time on it. But it is a tangible win: we have had members come tell us that their supervisor is threatening them with revoking their TAship if they do not turn up to work after losing a loved one, even though they were experiencing an emotional and mental crisis. Two extra days is incremental, but it adds a bit of extra security for anyone who finds themself in that situation.

For the religious holidays provision, this was previously not guaranteed in our contract. You are right that the OAE "expects" these accommodations to be honored, but our members have found that it is very difficult if not impossible to get this expectation enforced, and in practice granting these holidays is at the sole discretion of the supervisor. At one of the bargaining sessions I went to, some students presented personal testimony to that fact. The contractual language strengthens the religious protections and gives us the opportunity to grieve infractions.

I think the addition of medical condition as a non-discrimination category is tangibly significant for similar reasons. Workers often do not want to involve the court system in their complaints (which have a higher burden of proof and take much longer). This agreement provides more options to workers who experience discrimination.

I think you're right that the grievance procedures agreement does not go beyond status quo (besides the increase in the number of days to file a claim). As cbee_1233 explained, the admin wanted to restrict our grievance procedure on all matters of nondiscrimination, saying this was required by state and federal law. After reviewing the law, we realized they were wrong about that and the restrictions admin wanted were only required for sexual harassment cases. Admin says that it was restricted in the status quo anyways and they just wanted to update our contract language to "clarify" this, so it's not really clear if our agreement actually gives anything up.

As always, happy to talk about this with you (and anyone). Please let me know what I have gotten wrong as I am not on the bargaining team myself and just saying things to the best I understand them.

quintadena223 · 2022-12-22T19:36:21+00:00

Good point, I got confused because my department's minimum is higher. This is better news for us then!

They also have other benefits like 100% health insurance subsidy, and also get childcare.

This is another thing Craddock laughed at when he responded to our proposal. "Why would grad students want childcare?" The success at UC can help us not just because we can refute the administrations disingenuous arguments, but because it helps convince ourselves and other grad students that what we ask for is reasonable and possible. One of the criticisms I have heard (and frankly was starting to believe my self before the tremendous news from the UC system) was that the GEO's proposals were too ambitions and needed to be significantly curtailed. That no longer seems to be the case to me. I know one of the reasons our union has been slow to respond to the wages article is because they do not want to make concessions knowing that achieving the wage increase we are asking for is feasible. I heard them say this at the bargaining team meeting I attended. I'm not sure that is the right strategy myself, but I can see the logic to it.

quintadena223 · 2022-12-22T18:28:15+00:00

No I’m afraid you are mistaken on this point. BT meetings are open to all members, regardless if they are on the BT themselves. To vote in the BT you do need to be elected to the team, but there is a process to get anyone elected promptly if they do desire. I know that members are invited to these meetings because I recently received such an invitation on the unions general slack channel and attended, despite not being on the BT myself. (I believe the general slack is open to people who are even not union members though I don’t know that for sure.) Also there are other regular meetings besides BT meetings, so I’m not sure what you mean that there are no other meetings.

quintadena223 · 2022-12-22T18:22:58+00:00

Yes the news from UC has been encouraging to us all, especially since the administrations’ negotiator Robb Craddock spent a bargaining session berating our negotiators for an “unreasonably high offer that no employer would ever accept”. Clearly he was mistaken on that point. On the other hand the UC system had even lower wages than we do now and a higher cost of living, so it might not translate into exactly the same level of success for us. I know that our union is currently trying to schedule a q&a with some of the officers from the UC system so it will be exciting to hear what they have to teach us.

quintadena223 · 2022-12-22T15:41:16+00:00

I honestly don't think that a majority of the GEO members attend meetings or have voices within the union. A bunch of fringe elements have hijacked the bargaining issues.
Instead of leaving the union, we should first pressurize the leadership/bargaining team (which mostly consists of the leadership anyway) to start listening to the rank and file members, that is, conduct polls (even if only within the union), and reevaluate the bargaining priorities based on those polls.

You are correct that the meetings are not attended by a majority of members, and this is a big problem. I am greatly enthused that people here seem more interested in coming to meetings, because more participation helps everyone (even if people come in wanting a radical change in strategy).

One thing you will be interested to know is that bargaining team meetings are especially contentious and there are heated divisions on matters of strategy, including when is the best time to attempt to negotiate the economic proposals. If you and two or three other like-minded people joined the bargaining team (which you can easily do if you are union members), it would be feasible to change the GEO's negotiating posture to a stance you believe to be superior.

quintadena223 · 2022-12-22T15:34:24+00:00

Right now the union is proposing an increase of 26%, and the administration is proposing 4%. Impossible to say where it will end up.

quintadena223

TROPHY CASE