Statement on Graduate Employees’ Working Conditions during the COVID-19 Pandemic
GEO members,
First of all, we sincerely hope that you are staying safe and healthy in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. We know that the news and updates at the federal level, various state levels, and the university level have been nonstop, confusing, and at times contradictory, and want to emphasize that the most crucial thing right now should be caring for ourselves and others through self-care, social distancing, and safe forms of mutual aid. The coronavirus has also thrown a lot of people’s employment situations into question, including those of graduate employees. We send this email to remind you of your rights as workers and condense all the information regarding graduate employees that UIUC has sent us. Like all of you, GEO leadership has been placed under enormous stress thanks to the pandemic adding to the various other things the union is working on, but, most importantly, we are a union of and for our membership: it’s not enough to say that we have your back, but, in the spirit of solidarity, that we all have each other’s backs. In the face of COVID-19 just as much as anything else, we are stronger together.
Important Information: Your Rights as an Employee as Guaranteed by the GEO Contract
The GEO has the right to negotiate any changes to working conditions for bargaining unit members (BU = TAs and GAs). GEO Officers are preparing to bargain with the Admin likely next week: if you would like to contribute to this effort, please add to this document and/or email geo@uigeo.org.
Our Bargaining Team is currently working on the logistics of bargaining while maintaining social distancing practices. It is currently unknown if the next session, scheduled for March 30th, will still occur, or if it will be handled remotely.
If you have received an email asking you to fill out a “Telecommuting Agreement,” do not fill it out. GEO has not been contacted about this agreement and we see it as the kind of change to work conditions that we should have the right to bargain. We are currently seeking out information about how this agreement will be used and whether it violates our contract, and will let you know about any updates we are able to provide.
BU employees must be compensated even if their appointment is cancelled, as negotiated in our 2017-2022 Contract.
Your supervisor cannot ask you to work more than what is specified in your appointment letter and covered by your contract, despite the moves to remote instruction and changes to UIUC’s functioning. If you are worried that you are being asked to work more than you should be, consider tracking your hours worked and/or contacting GEO.
Tuition waivers, fee waivers, health insurance, and all benefits should remain even if class is canceled and no new TA/GA position is found.
ISSS has confirmed that no grad workers’ F1 status is threatened by teaching online.
RAs, PGAs, TAs, GAs all get sick days. Assistants are eligible for 13 (thirteen) noncumulative and non-compensable work days (that is, sick days you cannot roll over or cash in) of sick leave at the percentage of their appointment for each appointment year, whether they are appointed on 9 (nine) month or 12 (twelve) month basis. See the 2017-2022 Contract for more details.
Despite the global pandemic, the U of I Board of Trustees approved increasing healthcare premiums for all students by 33%. See below for more information and what we can do to combat this outrageous decision.
The Campus Faculty Association (CFA = para-union for tenured and tenure-track faculty at UIUC) has issued this statement on the response to covid-19. Note that they “object to the notion that all faculty members can or must comply with immediate calls for making this transition” to online instruction.
GEO Actions in Progress:
Strain on Workers
Our TA members have been asked, with very little preamble, to spend their Spring Breaks finding a way to migrate their classes, which had been meticulously planned for a classroom, to functioning remote learning models. We recognize that a week is not nearly enough time to prepare an online class or migrate existing classroom materials to a distance learning model, and also that many of our TA members have not had the same training in distance learning that they have in classroom learning. With little to no context or institutional support, this request by University administration places enormous strain on instructors to maintain their quality of teaching in a medium they are unfamiliar with, while also coordinating changes to their daily routines, their other work as graduate employees, financial arrangements, and other aspects of life that have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, in just a week.
We are concerned, in short, about our membership being overworked during break and taking on extra stress during a global pandemic. To that end, we fully support the message of this article, which tells us that now is not the time to learn to become exemplary online instructors, and that our focus should be finishing the task, not accomplishing the impossible goal of sustained quality. We stand strong in our commitment to the fact that online classes should not be a reason for our members to work more than they were during in-person instruction, because we are still the same workers, with the same rights, that we were before.
Healthcare Premiums
On March 12th, after the UI system had announced that classes would be remote beginning after Spring Break, the Illinois Board of Trustees decided to increase UIUC undergraduate and graduate students’ healthcare premiums by 33%. Undergraduate premiums will increase by $179 to $723 per semester, while graduate premiums will increase by $231 to $927 per semester. This increase was determined based on “increased claims over the last year.”
On March 13th, one day later, the US Government declared COVID-19 a national emergency. The BoT decision, coming in the midst of a pandemic, is incredibly damaging to our membership, who are currently having to fight even to make a living wage and are already dealing with the upheaval in their lives caused by the pandemic.
GEO is committed to fighting this severely damaging decision, and while we do so, we urge our members to use their own power and fight back with us.
Share this widely over social media — solidarity strengthens us!
Call the Board of Trustees (217-333-1920) and the UIUC President’s Office (217-333-3070), and demand they fully cover our healthcare fee now and including over the summer.
Get Active!
If you are able, now is an important time to become more active in GEO! We need as many people as possible engaged in efforts to organize virtually and imagine what that may look like, continue our work with RA/PGA unionization, help with any grievances that may be filed as a result of COVID-19 and our changing work conditions, impact bargaining the effects of the pandemic, and help with the various other tasks that have only become harder thanks to the necessity of social distancing. This is not work that GEO’s officers can do alone, nor is it work that the GEO should be doing without input from a larger portion of our membership -- we are a member-run union, not an external body. Coming together with your colleagues to help better work conditions can be a very useful stress reliever and a great thing to do for fellow and future members who may be extremely at-risk at times like these. If you’d like to get involved, regardless of your prior experience, please email geo@uigeo.org. We are only as strong as our membership!
We hope you are staying safe, healthy, and with loved ones. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or comments on any of the information above!
In Solidarity,
Graduate Employees’ Organization
809 S. 5th St., Geneva Room
Champaign, IL 61820
Email: geo@uigeo.org