GEO members: "We are striking as an act of community care"

by Roshan Krishnan and Matt Sehrsweeney

On the eve of Labor Day, the University of Michigan’s Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), representing graduate student instructors and staff assistants, voted to strike. As one of the oldest graduate employee unions in the country, GEO has stood at the vanguard of the university labor movement since its inception, forcing the university to be a standard bearer in graduate student benefits and compensation. This strike continues GEO’s tradition of organizing for historic and unprecedented demands: we demand a more safe and just pandemic response, and the defunding and demilitarization of campus police. This is novel on both fronts: it is the first campus strike in response to the nationwide mishandling of university reopening plans, and the first, to our knowledge, to make abolitionist demands. These sets of demands, perhaps seemingly disparate at first glance, are tightly connected - both advance the broader goal of creating a more just campus community.

The strike was not a spur of the moment decision - it was the culmination of many months of frustration with the university’s utter intransigence, as the administration continually disregarded our increasingly urgent demands for a safe and just return to campus. 

The GEO bargaining team first published our demands in an open letter co-signed by our lecturer’s union and several graduate student organizations in early May. Over the next two months, our team repeatedly reached out to the university administration asking for a seat at the table in deciding on reopening plans. All requests were ignored. In late June, the university released their “reopening plan:” an opaque, sparsely detailed document that lacked critical information about how the university would track COVID-19 as students returned to campus. Finally, in late July, as the school year approached, GEO began bargaining for these demands with the university. That same week, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer encouraged universities across the state to go remote, and U of M’s own Privacy and Ethics Committee sent a report to the administration expressing deep concern with the reopening plan. Though this report was not released to the public, it was leaked in August, sparking public outcry across the community. As frustration with the university reached a fever pitch, university faculty planned a vote of no confidence in President Schlissel. Finally, at the end of the first week of classes, GEO membership decided that the only course of action that could forestall catastrophe was a work stoppage, and 79% of membership voted to strike. 

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The administration’s response has been heavy-handed and dismissive: the first day of the strike, the university filed an unfair labor practice charge against the union. Public responses, in the form of emails sent to the UM community, have unilaterally ignored our concerns about campus safety, made disingenuous and false claims about our demands, and attempted to pit us against undergraduates. This response is disappointing, but not unexpected. Michigan represents the archetypal neoliberal university, one which has all but completely abandoned its dedication to the public good in pursuit of profit, while steadily eroding the ability of students, faculty, and staff to place any checks on the power of the university’s veritable C-suite of exorbitantly-paid administrators. This is true of many universities across the United States (one can observe what's happening at schools like Johns Hopkins), but at a public university, this phenomenon is especially egregious. As student activists have repeatedly pointed out, the University of Michigan’s endowment stands at over $12 billion, around half of which is unrestricted, a rainy-day fund that can and should be used for exactly the type of crisis that we’re currently experiencing. Instead, the university has opted to raise tuition, institute a COVID fee for students, and appease one of Ann Arbor’s biggest landlords (who is also a UM regent and Donald Trump megadonor) by bringing students back to campus.

After two days of work stoppage, UM presented GEO with an offer that failed to satisfy a single demand made by the union. Notably, the University flatly refused to engage with two of GEO’s most pressing concerns: defunding and demilitarizing the campus police, and increasing COVID testing beyond UM’s paltry current rate. This offer was accompanied by intimidation. After a nearly 4-hour meeting with a record-breaking attendance of over 1,100 GEO members, the union voted overwhelmingly to reject the university’s offer. In response, the University filed a legal injunction against the union, incurring widespread criticism from students, faculty, and alumni. Despite the considerable risk posed to members by the continuation of the strike, we are determined to maintain the fight for the safety of our entire community. Fundamentally, our strike is one of community care. 

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The University has argued that GEO’s demands, particularly those on campus policing, are not relevant to the working conditions of graduate workers represented by the union. We could not disagree more. GEO represents graduate workers of innumerable backgrounds, including BIPOC workers who are subject to increased danger from armed campus police and workers who are especially vulnerable to the University’s poor COVID planning for health-related and socioeconomic reasons.

However, we also know that as members of the campus community as well as greater Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County, we have a responsibility to advocate for a practice of care for our entire community. That means caring for undergraduate Resident Advisors who are currently on strike in response to the unsafe working conditions that UM has forced them into, and undergraduate students who are being quarantined by the University with inadequate food and toiletries. It means caring for dining workers and other staff who are also experiencing unsafe working conditions and threats from the administration. But it also means caring for all of our Black and Indigenous neighbors and folks of color in our community who are at increased risk from militarized policing. Indeed, it means caring for our entire county and Southeast Michigan community, which risks becoming a COVID hotspot due to UM’s reckless reopening. We strike because we are not just graduate students and workers; we are members of the community who want to ensure the safety of our friends, families, and neighbors in the face of UM’s greed.

This type of action, one that mobilizes labor power to advance goals that extend beyond traditional compensation and workplace safety issues (although, as mentioned previously, pandemic protections are also certainly workplace safety issues), is known as bargaining for the common good. This strategy has proven remarkably effective in improving not just conditions for workers, but for communities more broadly. In recent years, the tactic has become increasingly common in teachers unions. After a six-day strike in 2019, UTLA, representing teachers across Los Angeles, won expanded green space, increased support for immigrant families, and an end to random searches - which, like our policing demands, disproportionately impacted non-white students and workers. That same year, after an eleven day strike,  the Chicago Teachers Union won resources for homeless students, hard caps on class sizes, and nurses and counselors in every school. And another graduate employees union, representing workers at the University of Illinois-Chicago, fought for their international students, eventually cutting the international student fee in half. In fighting for these non-traditional demands, these victories not only advance the condition of the entire community, but also serve to build coalitions that extend beyond the walls of the workplace. These labor actions, in centering community care, also serve as a practice in building community power. 

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The University of Michigan administration has refused to engage with our common-good demands. But we are undeterred, because unlike our administration, we are resolute in upholding our commitments to our community. We know that we must repudiate the very nature of the neoliberal, capitalist university. We know that universities can be true engines of public good: institutions that serve their communities rather than the pocketbooks of their high-level administrators; that open their doors to all instead of excluding by race and income; that engage in collaborative, community-driven knowledge production rather than extractive, exploitative community relations. This kind of transformation, of course, is bigger than one strike. But we believe, in this time of crisis, that there is no choice but to struggle toward this ultimate goal. By striking in support of our community, we hope to take a step in that direction.

Roshan Krishnan is a master’s student at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability and a GEO member.

Matt Sehrsweeney is a master’s student at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability and Ford School of Public Policy, and an organizer and steward in GEO.

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