The University of Michigan Graduate Employees’ Organization went on strike. It's now a university-wide protest.

by Billy Anania

Source: GEO Facebook group

When the University of Michigan Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) called for a strike last week, the graduate instructors and assistants were only planning on withholding their labor for a few days. After the union received support from the school’s resident advisors and dining hall staff, however, the greater student body began skipping classes and picketing in solidarity. 

Now on its second week, the strike has evolved into a university-wide protest of the administration’s COVID-19 response and excess policing on campus, with the potential to go wall-to-wall as the fall semester progresses.

Over Labor Day weekend, more than 1,250 GEO members held a vote to cancel classes and published a list of demands — including widespread virus testing and contact tracing, remote work capabilities, childcare subsidies, financial support for international students, and degree extensions. Outside of pandemic measures, the union has called on the university to defund the Division of Public Safety and Security (DPSS) by 50% and sever all ties with the Ann Arbor Police Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

Rather than negotiate with workers directly, the university filed an unfair labor practice charge against the union, threatened to cut their pay, and urged faculty and lecturers to cross the picket line. Administrators also hired an outside attorney from a law firm that has helped crack down on at least one other Michigan student union and recently pushed Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to “reopen” the state in mid-April. GEO members have been in and out of negotiations with representatives from Academic Human Resources, but the union voted to reject their initial offer and extend the strike until all demands are met.

Erin Markiewitz, the Vice President of GEO, told Strikewave that the university has been ambiguous about who really decided to reopen the university — a result of the administration’s decentralized organizational techniques to limit accountability. She claimed this was indicative of the overall COVID-19 response since March, prioritizing security over public safety. 

“During our conversations with the Deans over the summer, it became clear that they did not have complete information, or they just didn’t want to tell us,” she said. “In general, they seemed unwilling to make centralized, unilateral group decisions with other departments.”

One major concern among GEO members is the scarcity of virus tests and inaccuracy of data on the university’s public website. A dedicated COVID-19 tracker relays data from fragments of the campus population, as testing is currently voluntary and required only for symptomatic patients.

“We need to get more transparency around the current testing strategy and push the university to prioritize widespread asymptomatic testing, because they are currently only doing a small amount of that on an opt-in basis,” said sociology PhD student Jeff Lockhart, who works on the GEO’s COVID Caucus. “So far, about 5,000 people have opted in, and they want to test about 3,000 per week, meaning the same people will likely get tested over and over. Those who opt out will be taking a risk, as the data will be inaccurate and under-represent the number of sick people on campus.”

While universal testing would help ensure the safety of undergraduates in student housing, the university has instead focused on containing the virus through policing. A new DPSS program called Michigan Ambassadors encourages graduate students to volunteer with the public safety officers who patrol dorms and off-campus housing. Because the university’s residence staff is currently on strike, the administration has sent the Ambassadors to enforce their social distancing guidelines.

“Instead of a public-health-backed approach to monitoring a pandemic — through testing, online learning, and similar mechanisms that other universities have implemented — the university instead chose to increase surveillance,” said Dom Bouavichith, a linguistics PhD student on the GEO’s communications team. “In the administration’s summary of testing demands, they claimed there is not enough data to publish models and that confidence intervals are too wide. Many of us are scientists; we know how models work. We know that we need more data for those intervals to shrink, and the university has refused to engage with our requests for more testing.”

Represented by the American Federation of Teachers, the GEO has been pressuring University of Michigan to recognize its precarious living and working conditions since the summer, when it staged a die-in over the school’s reopening plans. Students are now holding demonstrations across Central Campus, purposely passing by construction sites and dining halls to encourage workers to join them. Dining hall staff have conducted a slowdown, and trade union workers walked off the job to respect the picket line. Faculty members signed an open letter and penned an op-ed in The Michigan Daily, condemning administrators for criminalizing and silencing students; they held strikes of their own in August and will hold a vote of no confidence against President Mark Schlissel on Wednesday, September 16.

Looming over this strike is the question of how colleges can effectively address police violence on campus, and why the young organizers have taken an abolitionist approach. U-M administrators have only offered platitudes in their public statements, promising little more than future discussions on institutional racism. According to Clery Act reporting, only 3% of on-campus calls to police are related to violent incidents, meaning the vast majority of these calls do not require armed responses (This statistic only applies to on-campus incidents, not including the Ann Arbor Police Department’s regular patrolling). 

“The evidence is there — newspapers have covered the racial disparities in call responses, citations, and arrests for years on and around campus,” said Andrew Cabaniss, an archaeology PhD student. “Employees who refused to talk about policing on Tuesday of last week were willing to have good-faith discussions about campus climate, harm reduction, and defunding this weekend. We have a lot of work to do. The longer the strike goes on, the more our arguments are heard and, more importantly, understood.”

For added context, multiple members of GEO cited the AAPD murder of Aura Rosser in 2014 and a 2017 incident in which an AAPD officer drove an SUV onto a sidewalk to chase a robbery suspect running on foot. The officer rammed the SUV into a lamppost and dragged it across the Diag — an open public space full of onlooking students. 

While the administration has yet to detail another round of negotiations, they have worked to undermine the union at every turn since the initial offer rejection. The University Record, run by the school’s Public Affairs department, claimed that GEO leadership opposed the strike’s continuation, but this was allegedly a misstatement. In a video released on Monday, President Schlissel announced the university would seek a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against the union in an attempt to force the strikers back to work.

The University of Michigan strike is part of a larger effort among U.S. college students to push back against haphazard reopening procedures during the pandemic. At the time of publication, at least one U-M student has tested positive for COVID-19, and officials have warned that others may be at risk. According to the school’s COVID-19 data, more than 70 people associated with the university have tested positive since late August.

Billy Anania is an art critic, editor, and journalist in Brooklyn.