Strike by GEO: a final resort for obtaining a fair contract

Strikes are bad.

In fact, strikes are very bad.

Strikes are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things.

But I don’t know what else could have been done. I generally consider myself a fairly smart guy, and here I’m stumped.

I don’t know what else could have been done.

The list of ways in which we graduate students can (legally) influence the university administration and not simply receive edicts down from on high is small.

We can talk, but there’s no guarantee they will listen. We can bring them to court, but only if they’ve broken the law. And we can strike.

That’s it.

Striking is a way to draw attention, to show how bad things have gotten. To draw that attention, strikes are disruptive.

And unfortunately for all the students of the university, that means disrupting classes, it means interrupting learning. But it seems to be the only way to get the university administration to act.

The GEO attempted to start bargaining in April; the university didn’t respond until August.

The GEO attempted to hold numerous bargaining sessions shortly thereafter to come to an agreement; the university kept pushing the same contract over and over again (the university’s own bargaining team seemed disappointed with the contract they had to bring to the table).

And finally, the GEO talked about having a strike; and finally, the university began to compromise.

So I apologize to all the students affected by the strike. I really don’t know what else could have been done. I don’t know of anyone – outside of some sociologists interested in seeing labor relations play out for real – who would prefer to strike than to teach.

So if there were some other way to get the university to treat us like the adults we actually are, while allowing us to continue the education of our students uninterrupted, if you, dear reader, have any ideas at all, I’d be all ears.

And if it sounds at all that I’m spouting some GEO talking points, I probably am.

Since the negotiations began, I’ve been trying to keep myself informed of all the important factoids, and while every piece of news usually generated a detailed explanation from the GEO of the GEO’s position, the university was mum about its reasoning.

A friend of mine, who attended some of the early bargaining sessions, said that even direct questions to the university’s bargaining team for an explanation often went unanswered.

And then the university began to send out massmails.

Had the university not attempted to justify its position, I might have been content to sit on the sidelines, to support the efforts of the GEO, knowing they would likely not benefit myself but were important anyways.

I might have believed that the university had its reasons, and they might have been good reasons, but they weren’t allowed to give them due to some obscure legal precedent.

But the explanations given just came off as insulting.

Of course there was the usual collection of half-truths that comes with every debate: in attempting to justify why it for so long refused to budge on raising the minimum wage for assistants, the university pointed to how high the average wage was – two numbers which have little to do with one another.

But then it got worse, and worse, and worse...

The university talked almost exclusively about economic issues and ignored the non-economic complaints of the GEO (the university’s contract proposal originally forced graduate students who had been discriminated against to use a university lawyer to represent them in their case against the administration – a bad case of the fox guarding the hen house).

The university called the GEO’s tuition waiver stance an “11th hour demand” when it has been the GEO’s stance since negotiations began in April.

The university insisted that it had no intention of changing the tuition waiver policy, when it had tried to change it just last year.

And the coup de grace: the university spoke many times of the student’s right to attend class in order to paint the strike as unethical, and yet, the university itself was trying to force furloughs onto the grad students, which would have had the exact same effect of cancelling classes.

Given the choice between interrupting my student’s education by striking for a week, and being forced to not hold class for a month because of a furlough, I’d pick the former for my students every time.

To defend its position, the university insinuated that I and the rest of the graduate students were greedy, lazy, and unethical, ruining much of the hard work we have done to convince our students that we really do want them to succeed.

So I did that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad only-thing-I-could-think-of-to-do and joined the strike.

And I hope I never have to do it again.

Joseph is a graduate student.