Letter to the Editor: GEO’s contract demands are reasonable and necessary

The Michigan Daily recently published an opinion piece that contains significant misinformation about the Graduate Employees’ Organization and our campaign for affordability and dignity. The piece was met with considerable criticism — suggesting that most readers understand that the piece was not an accurate representation of our ongoing negotiations. Given the importance of our campaign to graduate workers, we wanted to set the record straight about our platform.

The article parroted a favorite talking point of the administration: that graduate student workers only work part time, and therefore are not entitled to a living wage. This claim simply does not reflect the reality of graduate workers’ daily lives. Graduate workers are expected to work far more than 20, or even 40, hours per week — whether it’s teaching, research, mentorship, service or unpaid DEI work. Taking on additional jobs is not possible for many of us. Indeed, doing so would violate the visas of international students, and the University is currently refusing to include a provision in our contract guaranteeing our right to take on additional work. Moreover, when graduate students are on fellowship — getting paid the Graduate Student Instructor salary, but working solely on our research — we are expected to work on our research full time and then some! 

We don’t pay rent part time, we don’t buy groceries part time. The salary we get as GSIs must cover our entire cost of living, not half of it. It’s also ludicrous to consider tuition waivers — money that workers never see, but is merely shifted from one U-M ledger to another — as part of graduate student workers’ compensation. The IRS doesn’t consider this taxable income, and neither should our employer. To be clear: the idea that graduate students work part time erases much of our labor — labor that generates millions of dollars for the University — while excluding graduate workers without intergenerational wealth.

It is also simply incorrect to characterize “the abolition of the Division of Public Safety and Security” as one of our “non-academic demands.” Neither GEO nor our Abolition Caucus has passed a demand to Academic HR that calls for the abolition of DPSS. Instead, we have proposed that the University fund a public safety alternative to DPSS: the Coalition for Re-envisioning Our Safety’s community- and evidence-based unarmed, non-police crisis response program. This kind of unarmed response program is based on existing models all over the country, has been endorsed by over 50 community organizations and was supported by 93% of the Ann Arbor community in a recent poll — hardly an extremist position. We are disappointed that The Daily’s opinion piece did not bother to investigate our public safety proposals, which have been developed in collaboration with allies and community members from across the campus and the wider community.

While the essay misrepresented GEO’s platform, we’ve made our positions clear. As GEO’s Abolition Caucus wrote in The Daily last year, adding more police is not a public safety solution. The Abolition Caucus writes, “Rather than rebrand the same old police reforms, we believe in envisioning an unarmed, non-police emergency response in Ann Arbor, including the University’s campus.” As the caucus advocated in The Daily last month, “DPSS’s more-than-$35-million budget can be put toward alternatives such as the Coalition for Re-envisioning Our Safety’s, as well as toward other beneficial ends, including better wages for staff and student workers, better health and mental care, better support for survivors of sexual violence and housing for the unhoused.” We remain vehemently opposed to the violence of policing and will continue to work toward a world where police have become obsolete.

Finally, the article presents some misconceptions about our 2020 Strike for Safe Campus. The University did not have “rigid safety measures” in fall 2020. The University did not have the capacity for randomized testing, which is why a demand for such testing was part of our platform. In an open letter, more than 800 U-M students, staff and instructors protested the “absence of a clear plan based on science.” Indeed, the safety measures that were in place were so inadequate that Washtenaw County had to issue a stay-in-place order for U-M students by mid-October. (The initial version of the article also referred to fall 2020 as being “after the COVID-19 pandemic.” More than 350,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in 2020).

Graduate students went on strike because it was obvious to us that the University wasn’t taking the pandemic, the health of U-M students and workers or the concerns we raised with their reopening policies seriously. Only after graduate students took action in large numbers did the real negotiations begin. Our strike for a safe and just campus connected the pandemic to the latest evidence that policing is “a public health crisis”; it’s a connection we’ve continued to invoke in our contract negotiations this year. 

Graduate student workers are the backbone of this University. We are often the main point of contact for undergraduates, contribute to over $1 billion in annual research revenue and teach thousands of hours of classes each term. On top of that, the teaching we do brings in over $200 million in profit for the University each year — by a conservative estimate — and nearly $350 million according to the “best estimate” of Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University. The University of Michigan could easily afford to pay us a living wage, fund a non-police response and implement every one of our proposals. If anything, our proposals don’t go far enough!

The stakes of this campaign are too high, and the needs of graduate workers on this campus far too serious, for us to tolerate misinformation and fear-mongering around our platform. Graduate workers know what our work is worth, and we hope that every member of our campus community will stand with us as we fight for a fair contract and equity and dignity at the University. 

The Graduate Employees’ Organization at the University of Michigan can be reached at UMGEO@geo3550.org.