GEO rally focuses on contract negotiations

Cedric De Leon and other

members of GEO protest in order to receive a

better GSI

contract in front of the LSA

building

yesterday.

Among other things, GEO is demanding a 27 percent wage increase for GSIs.

DAVID ROCHKIND/Daily

By Nick Falzone
Daily Staff Reporter

As perturbed graduate student instructors raised signs proclaiming "Without GSIs, U of M dies" high in the air, approximately 225 members of the University community congregated in the Diag yesterday to raise awareness about the Graduate Employment Organization's contract negotiations with the University.

As Feb. 1 - the day GEO's contract with the University expires - looms on the horizon, many GEO members expressed their dissatisfaction with the negotiation process in front of hundreds of their colleagues.

"It was exactly three months ago that we started negotiation with the administration and they have moved very slowly from the beginning," GEO president Eric Dirnbach said. "We are here to tell the administration and the University community that the members of our union are dissatisfied with the current state of negotiations, and that we want a new contract."

After 45 minutes of speeches by Ann Arbor community members addressing some of GEO's most important unresolved proposals such as paid international GSI training and GSI affirmative action policies, many of the rally participants began marching north from the Diag. Shouting chants of "Who does the work - we do the work" as cars honked support from the streets, they finished their march in front of the LSA building.

Negotiations between GEO and the University were scheduled to begin there later in the day.

During yesterday's negotiations, the University responded to GEO's wage counterproposal which requested, among other things, a 27 percent wage increase in GSIs' salaries.

Dan Gamble, the University's chief negotiator, said the University reinforced its original proposal of a 2.5 percent guaranteed annual salary increase yesterday. Gamble said this was the minimum amount GSIs would get, adding that their increase would be equivalent to that of the faculty's.

Gamble's negotiating team also presented GEO with salaries of other GSIs throughout the United States. Through this presentation, Gamble said he wanted to show the graduate employees they were being paid well compared to other universities' GSIs.

"My whole goal today was to tell them we (the negotiating team) looked at the other schools," Gamble said. "None of the GSIs' other salaries approached theirs at all."

Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs William Ensminger said that although he is aware of the negotiations, he is uncertain of the details.

Many GEO members were dissatisfied with the University's presentation, dubbing it ineffective.

"The administrators refused to take GEO's wage proposal seriously," Susan Chimonas, a doctoral Sociology student, said. "This was not a counterproposal, instead they just got statistics from other schools about wages."

Chimonas added that since the University's response included nothing about cost of living, the statistics were meaningless to GEO.

"Everyone knows $1 buys more in one place than in another," Chimonas said. "Without the cost of living information, the dollar values of wages didn't mean anything. They kind of wasted our time."

One reason GEO wants such a significant GSI salary increase is due to the cost of living in Ann Arbor. Dirnbach said the average GSI spends more than 40 percent of their monthly income on rent, leaving reasonably little money left for other commodities.

Gamble said the negotiation team did not include cost of living information in its presentation because GEO would be dissatisfied with whatever was presented.

"No cost of living information was going to be high enough for them to reinforce their proposal," Gamble said.

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