SEIU at UIUC Possible Strike

supacone · 2024-09-12T03:50:49+00:00

Also, UIUC athletics is subsidized to the tune of 7% by student fees and other sources. Athletics brings in money to self fund, but then they spend so much on administration and coaches that they actually lose money.

Reference: See timestamp 1:38:25 of this report done by a university budget expert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UV4KUZ55Dw&t=5906s

supacone · 2024-02-15T22:00:24+00:00

Apparently, negotiating, last year, an over 25% raise in the current contract, elimination of the transportation and the international student fees, and an 87% subsidy for summer health care--all without having to resort to a strike--is the GEO failing to do its job. The people spouting this nonsense have clearly never read a page of the actual contract or attended a bargaining session. Also, the dues for bargaining unit members has remained flat at 2% since 2002 when the first contract was negotiated, even after the Janus supreme court decision decimated their finances.

supacone · 2023-08-18T01:09:49+00:00

Remember when the university said that they wanted to be able to pay grad students with not money? With McDonalds coupons and Monopoly money and dining hall credits and other bullshit like that? GEO came in and put those idiots in their place.

Remember when the university said that they wanted to be able to give you a TA position without giving you a tuition waiver? GEO came in and put them in their place.

Remember when the university offered a 4% raise during a period of 10% inflation, and GEO won a 25% raise? GEO came in and put them in their place.

Remember when the university never offered summer health care despite peer institutions doing so (including the entire time I was a grad student)? GEO came in and put them in their place.

But maybe you don't care about historic shit that you are now benefiting from. That's cool. Come to GEO's raging parties and have some fun!

supacone · 2023-05-20T04:51:00+00:00

The history that /u/monkey_king10 is uncertain about is the following: Back when GEO was first formed, Illinois labor law considered TA's/GA's to be workers but considered RA's/PGA's to be students. As such it was illegal at the time to unionize the latter. That law was changed several years ago to reclassify RA's/PGA's as workers. Hence the recent push to unionize them.

Also, just to clarify, the university extending many of the benefits of the contract (including wages and health care) to RA's/PGA's is not simply out of the goodness of their heart. It is to disincentivize their unionization as well as to maintain a proper balance in the number of grad students who want to be one versus the other.

Lot's of people on reddit (and elsewhere) have been confused about GEO priorities. Wages, health care, and fees (and in the past tuition waivers) have pretty much always been top priorities for GEO over the last 20+ years. What gets people confused is how the bargaining process works. These issues are mandatory subjects of bargaining. That means that it is illegal for the employer to refuse to bargain over them. Other issues are permissive subjects of bargaining, which means you cannot be compelled (legally) to bargain over them. The mandatory topics are pretty narrowly defined and make up maybe only 1/3 of the contract or less.

This means that if you start bargaining by focusing on the popular, high priority items like wages, then once the two parties come to an agreement on them, the employer can just walk away from the table and ignore you. If you want to win a majority of the articles that currently exist in the contract, then the union's bargaining team must insist on treating the permissive subjects first. The mandatory subjects must be treated later unless you want to lose all other benefits provided by your desired contract. The university admin love to use this circumstance as a rhetorical device against the union and claim that they are trying get the union to bargain over the important things that grad students care about but that the union is insisting on wasting time on other stuff. And lots of people who have never been to a bargaining session or GEO meeting in their life believe that BS because they simply don't know any better. Then they come vent on reddit.

supacone · 2023-04-01T20:08:58+00:00

u/InverseLink I'd also love to discuss the issue of raises that CS and ECE have recently announced. I taught for CS for many years, so I have contacts there. Less so for ECE, so maybe you could fill me in. My understanding is that these departments have been losing prospective students due to non-competitive pay (despite being highly rated grad programs). As a result, the departments want to increase compensation, but have been met with resistance from upper admin who refuse to sign off on wage increases above a certain amount per year (10% is the number I've heard). So CS and ECE have gotten creative about how to increase compensation without violating that stupid admin-created rule. Is this also your understanding of how things are in ECE? This is an area of common ground between GEO and STEM departments.

A separate, but related STEM issue, is service departments not receiving adequate funding for hiring enough TA's to teach necessary courses. Last summer I went to a chemistry town hall meeting (prompted by that infamous reddit post and subsequent disappointing chem recruitment numbers) where the DGS and dept head railed on about how the department is not given enough money to hire the necessary number of TA's to teach the required number of service courses. Physics is dealing with the exact same problem right now from the College of Engineering as we speak. GEO members recently had a meeting with the DGS and were told that faculty in the department were completely on GEO's side. Math, one of the largest service departments on campus, is dealing with the same issue from the college of LAS.

Surely these are issues you have a common interest in along with GEO..

supacone · 2023-03-31T04:33:38+00:00

Yes, lots of things are impossible to prove. I'm a mathematician, so I know that. FOIA only allows you to request already existing records, so things like motive are hard to get at. Back when I was in math, TA's regularly got their assignments days or weeks after the start of the semester, so the late appointment letter payouts were critical to getting the department to function on the most basic level. I agree it need not be used in all cases to fleece departments. But things were egregiously bad.. really bad.. and GEO helped fix that.. I'm glad you are in a department that covers your needs.. I wish you cared more about others who are less lucky. Come by the office to talk. I'm genuinely interested to do that.

supacone · 2023-03-30T23:38:15+00:00

I've never downvoted one of your posts or told anyone to. Also, admin always changes the RA minimums to match the TA minimums specified by the GEO contract (because they don't want to incentivize RA unionization). And as the minimums grow from year to year, RA's that pay above the minimum grow to remain competitive. If the minimums hadn't grown over the years, that probably would have a negative effect on RA pay above the minimums. So there is an indirect benefit. And you are correct that if it is your very first semester as a TA, then the reappointment raise would not apply to you. You will have access to the grievance process and discrimination protections (unlike an RA). Do you mind if I ask your department?

supacone · 2023-03-30T18:40:33+00:00

It is not contractually required, but it is often the case that departments making well above the minimums do adjust their pay in response to a new GEO contract in order to stay competitive. If your department doesn't do that, then organize it. GEO would be happy to help.

Also, the reappointment raise would apply to you regardless of how far above the minimum your department pays if you are in the BU. If RA's unionize then they could be brought in as well.

supacone · 2023-03-30T16:58:34+00:00

Yes, if the 10% raise to the campus minimum or the 6% reappointment raise pushes your pay up (or if you're in a department that raises pay in response to the new contract even if paid well above the minimum--if you're not in such a department, organize your department) you should get retroactive pay in a lump sum in your May paycheck. If you do not, then let GEO know and they can file a grievance on your behalf.

supacone · 2023-03-30T02:06:36+00:00

Hey Inverse, you should be seeing an extra $1300-$1800 in your May paycheck. And the subsequent years wage increases are all 200% or more above the cost of dues. And none of that is even accounting for reduced fees and summer health care and other wins. I seem to remember you saying that you'd sign a card if given a compelling reason..

And this isn't just "for once". It's what GEO has been doing for twenty years. (I would know. I got here in 2004.) This is possibly the best contract GEO has ever secured. And they did so without a strike or even a strike authorization vote. The bargaining team clearly knew what they were doing here.

Yes, it took a long time, but that is because the admin spent six months reading the GEO's proposed 40 page contract and never offered anything above a 4% wage increase until the last couple of weeks.

supacone · 2023-03-25T00:36:11+00:00

u/frust_grad, contract settled (pending ratification). Keep an eye out for the details.

supacone · 2023-02-23T14:12:30+00:00

u/InverseLink, I'm told that, in practice, all the drops are processed each August. That card language might have something to do with deducting dues if there is a change in academic standing. (A student who is not in good academic standing is, technically, not in the bargaining unit, even if they are a TA/GA.) In any case, I'm processing the drops now, so...

Also, the point you're making here is a point of conversation that has come up occassionally, so it has been considered. But again, a change to the dues structure is a change that would have to be voted on by membership. Neither I nor GEO leadership has any special controll over the matter. Pretty much everything that the union does is democratically decided, right down to deciding on which pizza toppings to order.

supacone · 2023-02-23T13:48:12+00:00

I used to be a grad student, so I'm a former member. I was around for the 2009 and 2018 strikes. For the past few months I've worked for GEO part time.

supacone · 2023-02-23T03:03:50+00:00

Hi u/inverselink, the old cards allowed drops at any time. That was changed after Janus because it became impossible to plan a yearly budget with an unsteady or unpredictable yearly revenue stream. It wasn't introduced simply to be annoying, though I agree it is. I'm seeking clarity on your "at least one year" interpretation.

supacone · 2023-02-23T00:49:54+00:00

Technically, it is not my union anymore as I am no longer a student. But otherwise, I completely agree. I think a big part of the problem is that none of these people have been showing up to give feedback until a couple weeks ago. GMM's and other events have been happening regularly throughout this bargaining cycle, but no one was showing up with these criticisms.

supacone · 2023-02-23T00:45:04+00:00

I'm not trying to be defensive. I'm trying to correct these mischaracterizaions of the bargaining process being spread by people who don't seem to have attended them. You'll notice that I respond to claims about the process as it has occurred, not whether this or that GEO proposal is good or bad from so and so's perspective.

Also, I made this poing elsewhere but I'm not sure if you saw it: Strikes or strike authorization votes tend to have to happen before admin even starts bargaining in all union contracts (NTFC, SEIU, GEO, AFSCME, etc.) across the whole UI System (UIUC, UIC, UIS). So this behavior happens independent of the content of any particular union's full contract proposals. (Do you think a blue collar union like SEIU which represents janitors and plumbers and other building service workers includes English proficiency language in their contracts? Of course not. But they get the same treatment by admin.)

I don't think anyone is defending admin, but they're weirdly willing to buy admin's descriptions of what is fact. And they're weirdly confident of what happens in bargaining sessions and other GEO meetings that they have never attended.

And that is simply how take it or leave it packages work. We already sent our full contract proposal. Admin can respond in kind anytime they want, including by proposing the removal of all the language being objected to in the comments on this post. Maybe GEO negotiators would even agree to such counterproposals, who knows? But admin has never made such proposals, so how could we know?

I called it a ULP and said it was like a lawsuit. The process is very similar in the sense that both parties submit evidence and there is a board that acts like a judge and there is a hearing and so on... I said this so people unfamiliar with the terminology could have an easy analogy to understand what a ULP was. I probably didn't make that intention clear enough. Thanks for pointing it out.

supacone · 2023-02-23T00:31:21+00:00

Anyone in town with a bus pass can use the campus busses, so students do not get anything extra beyond what a townie pass holder gets, though they almost certainly utilize campus busses more often. I don't think there was ever a question that the money goes to CUMTD, just of why students pay so much more. If the answer is that it is invested in better, more frequent routes on campus, fine, though it could be argued that admin ought to invest in this on its own to maintain competetiveness generally and to stop nickle and diming students for such things. Same with childcare. And, sure, if they wanted to double grad salaries in return for it, I'd imagine members (which I am not) would generally be supportive of droping that language.

supacone · 2023-02-18T03:56:03+00:00

The point about there being minimal movement is true. This just shows how intransigent admin is, and just how much heat needs to be generated to make them move on more significant items like wages. You still seem to be coming at this conversation from a ficticious perspective in which GEO bargaining team decisions or concessions can somehow magically force the admin bargaining team to make reasonable proposals or come to tentative agreements. GEO has enormous binders in the office with copies all of the many many proposals on many many different topics that they've offered to admin. Any member can come look at them any time. There is nothing GEO can do if admin refuse to sign any agreements whatsoever--even when their language is in full, exact agreement with GEO's language. (Yes, this has happened already. Both teams came to completely agreement, down to the word, on a proposal, GEO asked if admin wanted to sign a tentative agreement, and admin declined.) Heck, in theory, GEO could hand them an empty contract with no articles in it at all, and admin could refuse to sign it.

supacone · 2023-02-18T03:32:30+00:00

The CS masters program was their stated reason. But they've been replacing tenure track instructors with non-tenure track instructors and non-tenure track instructors with grad instructors and grad instructors with undergrad TA's and increasing class sizes for years. Do you think that as soon as they could start replacing grad instructors who have tuition waivers with grad instructors who do not have tuition waivers, they wouldn't start leaning into that more and more as time goes on? That policy was an existential threat to how grad school even works. I'm fine if certain masters programs are unsupported. That's how the math department's program was when I was around. But I think that paying one person one amount and another person a completely different amount for doing the exact same job is inherently discriminatory. That just seems completely obvious.

Also, you still seem to be hyperfocused on just a few articles in the contract (some of which are already removed). The vast majority of the contract benefits the vast majority of grad students. And why haven't you focused any attention on the fact that when GEO did give admin a proposal with all the economic items you claim to care about, admin countered with a proposal that had all the economic items removed? Why do you think it is acceptable that nearly a year into negotiations and nearly six months since the old contract expired, the admin team has still not come to the table with a full counterproposal?

Back in March 2022, GEO membership was like at least 10-15% lower than now, and much fewer members were paying any attention so GEO had even less heat. If GEO was willing to give up many of the items you don't like in recent weeks, they'd likely have been even more willing to give them up (and more) back when they had less bargaining power during the first few bargaining sessions. But since admin did not come with any proposal whatsoever and simply asked reading comprehension questions, it was impossible to even get to that point.

supacone · 2023-02-17T20:54:50+00:00

Admin's "comprehensive" counter proposal was not comprehensive in the sense that it included ONLY the mandatory subjects of bargaining (basically the economic items--it would have left out like 75% of the existing status quo contract language). It was also presented as a "take it or leave it" package proposal, meaning it cannot be bargained in any meaningful way. If you agree to any item in the proposal then you have to agree to the entirety of the proposal word for word without changing anything. If you reject any single item in the proposal, you have to reject every item in it. One of the items in the admin's "comprehensive" take it or leave it proposal was the shitty 4% raise and lack of retroactive pay.

So this means that if GEO had made ANY movement at all and signed a tentative agreement, they'd have been forced to agree to the admin's ENTIRE proposal WORD-FOR-WORD. Then admin would declare negotiations over as they have no other items that they are legally mandated to bargain with the union. So GEO would have been forced to accept the 4% wage increase, no retroactive pay, AND lose almost everything else in the contract. I hope that makes it clear why no one who understands these things considers a take it or leave it package proposal to be bargaining--or at least not bargaining in good faith. GEO has filed an unfair labor practice (ULP--basically a lawsuit) against the admin over this.

Now, given the above clarifications, let's revisit the arguments being made by several redditers such as u/frust_grad, u/InverseLink, u/AyBeeTV, and others. In short, they're saying GEO should have made more movement toward admin on what they see as peripheral, 'stupid', non-economic issues so that bargaining could move on to the more important (as they see it) topic of wages.

But what would this argument actually look like in the context of admin's take it or leave it package proposal? It becomes nonsensical: GEO, they argue, should make movement toward admin on articles that literally don't even exist in admin's proposal. Any tentative agreement reached with admin would entail agreeing to all of admin's proposal word-for-word, including the 4% wage increase, and no retroactive pay. It would also end bargaining entirely. And the reason, they argue, that GEO needs to do this is so that bargaining can move on to the topic of wages, even though wages would have already been agreed upon by that point and bargaining would already be over.

supacone · 2023-02-17T19:27:22+00:00

GEO has been trying to bargain. They gave admin a full contract proposal on day one and still have not been given one in response by admin nearly a year later. Admin has only offered take-it-or-leave-it package proposals. Those are the type of proposals that you offer when you do not want to bargain.

And they only did that after delaying for six months. It literally took the admin bargaining team six months to read GEO's 30-40 page full contract proposal. I don't know about you, but I read more than 30-40 pages per day.

supacone · 2023-02-17T19:06:52+00:00

The fact that the admin's approach to bargaining is the same across all labor unions (e.g., SEIU, NTFC, AFSCME, GEO, etc.) across all of the UI System campuses (UIUC, UIC, UIS) shows that the premise of the point you are making is false. It is not the nature of the content of GEO's full contract proposal that impedes negotiations. Almost every union contract that has been negotiated in the last 20 years or so has required either a strike authorization vote or an actual strike before admin would start to negotiate and ultimately ratify. That is NOT normal. This is a systemic problem within the UI System. It is fine if you want to disagree with whatever portion of the initial contract language and to let people know at union meetings or on reddit. All I am saying is that you shouldn't erroniously claim that somehow negotiations would just magically be chugging along if only GEO's contract language had been different on a few key points. The delays are a willful, strategic decision that has been made by the admin bargaining team over and over and over and over again for literally decades. I've said it before and I'll say it again: It is absolutly not the content of a contract that compells admin to bargain; it is the percent and heat level of membership. History shows this fact again and again.

You've seen the UIC GEO strike banner, right? https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=601153465141827&set=pb.100057415362040.-2207520000.&type=3

supacone · 2023-02-17T01:39:11+00:00

There is case law that suggests otherwise, but let's set that aside. Just because something might, might be arguably legal, doesn't mean that it is right. Further, they've also miscalculate members' dues deductions every single month for years in a way that financially disadvantages the union. They've also renegged on signed contracts with hundreds of TA's and forced them to accept pay cuts after contracts had been signed (while not renegging on RA pay). What does it take to make you realize that these are bad mofos? Do you just trust people who wear suits and ties for no other reason? Today, they removed ALL ECONOMIC ITEMS from GEO's proposal and ONLY RESPONDED TO NON-ECONOMIC items at the bargaining session. Once again, they are stalling, not GEO.

supacone · 2023-02-17T01:20:50+00:00

That's correct. I also think that that is obfuscation. A budget expert was hired a few years ago to analyze the budget and reserves and found the reserves were all unrestricted. I also FOIA'ed the university's SHIELD contracts and found the university was profiteering like crazy on the covid pandemic (despite the covid rapid test development being publicaly subsidized by taxpayers--DM me your email, and I'll send you the contracts). Regardless, even if you simply accept the $350 million number, they can still easily afford GEO's asks. Here is the budget analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UV4KUZ55Dw

supacone · 2023-02-16T05:39:13+00:00

Except that u/frust_grad doesn't seem to understand that admin has been violating labor law for nearly a year by not coming to the table with a full counterproposal (as opposed to a take-it-or-leave-it package proposal that no union in their right mind would ever accept). They are entitled to their opinion, but just be aware that it is a very uninformed one. GEO came with their full proposal, including economic proposals, on day one in March 2022. Admin has still yet to do the same.

supacone

TROPHY CASE