Commencement Entertainment

Congratulations on your graduation! The Graduate Employee Union is happy to have played a small part in the success of undergraduates and graduate students graduating this weekend! You may have stumbled upon this post from our graduation card and are looking for something to do while sitting in your lovely green robe!

To support the GEU, here are a few things you could do:

• Send an email to the MSU President LouAnna K. Simon, Provost June Youatt, and/or Associate Provost Terry Curry and tell them you stand with GEU (there's a form letter for inspiration at the bottom of this post).
• Take a #SolidaritySelfie and tweet it to @GradEmpUnion! You can stand with us and brag about your accomplishment all at once! 
• Sign our petition: http://tinyurl.com/q5xgza3
• If you're still around next week, come support us on Wednesday at 10am outside the Hannah Admin Building, as we ask MSU, who pulled away from the bargaining table late last night, to honor their commitment to bargain with us! Here's the facebook event for details!
• Read up on bargaining between GEU and MSU here on our blog!

Thanks for stopping by, and again, congratulations on your amazing achievement! Go Green!!


Form Letter for Your Inspirational Needs:

Dear President Simon,
I am an undergraduate/parent/graduate student/alumnus at MSU and I stand with the GEU. I want you to go back to the bargaining table next week and give them the tuition, healthcare, and salary support they need.

Sincerely,

Information you can pull from to help craft a letter of your own:

Dear Students,

This is what's going on in bargaining...

In the contract's anti-discrimination language, GEU insured that our contract will allow us to file grievances on all of the categories we initially proposed. The union plans to continue working to develop educational materials to help TAs navigate the process and create an inclusive environment free from harassment.

For tuition, the university agreed to drop the post-comprehensive exam tuition waiver reduction and to add 100 extra credits to pool available to help T.A.s whose waivers will not cover their courses. The combined effect of hearing from over 300 graduate students who could be hurt by the proposal and hearing from faculty, students, and parents in attendance at GEU events and through behind the scenes phone calls and emails, made it impossible for the university bargaining team to maintain their position. Your attendance at GEU events and behind the scenes phone calls and emails made a real difference.

Despite this substantial movement, the proposed tuition waiver is still not at a level comparable to other BIG 10 universities- but we have made substantial progress. We are still working to achieve summer tuition coverage for all TAs in the form of a wrap around waiver. If we have the ability to take summer courses, we will be able to more easily balance teaching, course work, and research during the fall and spring. This will also help to support the educational goals of many graduate students who work as adjuncts during the summer semester.

This movement was driven almost entirely by the support of faculty and students outside the bargaining room. And we need to intensify that pressure. The university is not willing to finalize their move on tuition unless we give somewhere else- they will not sign our waiver unless we agree to a grab bag of unacceptable proposals.

 In order to secure these tuition gains, they demand that we accept a contract with no university contribution to dependent health insurance premiums. This will make student contributions for dependent health insurance completely inaccessible for student parents. For example, the new cost to enroll two children will be $5,832, an increase of $2,730. They expect these costs will increase by 10% per year. Neither graduate students nor faculty can watch as we saddle parents with rapidly increasing healthcare costs.

 Late Thursday night, the university bargaining team seemed to indicate a willingness to move on dependent health care subsidies, our team rapidly drew up a new proposal and prepared to talk. However, they claimed that by following basic health laws now in place they are subsidizing our dependents' healthcare. Hiding behind the A.C.A. is not the same as providing active support for families.

Following one last ill considered proposal in which the university initially asked that we pay over 100% of the cost of dependent premiums (they quickly reconsidered this) it became clear that no more progress could be made for the night. The university then refused to honor the two remaining scheduled bargaining sessions and instead offered to meet with us starting again in June.

Ask them to come back to the bargaining table and bargain in good faith. TAs need a contract that helps them live while they teach the next generation of Spartans. Go Green.

General Assembly Thank You

All -

We are in the midst of planning an action in support of our graduating undergraduates and colleagues this weekend because bargaining last night...was a roller coaster ride that didn't end on a high note. If you have time tomorrow, plan on attending a graduation ceremony with us and handing out congratulation cards to the undergrads we helped graduate! Follow the blog and our social media for updates!!

You probably already read about bargaining in your email, and we'll post updates soon, but we wanted to take a minute and tell you about our successes this week.

We saw over 300 people at our grade ins last week. You came all the way out to Nisbet Hall, a place far out of the way for everyone except MSU's bargaining team, and showed your support. We were over 100 strong at the General Assembly yesterday at 5:00p.m. State Senator Curtis Hertel Jr. stopped in to show his support (listen to what he had to say on our facebook page, Graduate Employees Union - Michigan State University). 

Our bargaining team was in session until 1 a.m. last night. Your efforts last week make things possible at the bargaining table that wouldn't have been possible otherwise, but healthcare and tuition are still SERIOUS ISSUES we need to fight. Again, updates should be in your email and we will have a comprehensive blog post soon, but it was important for us to take a minute to say thanks for the actions we all did collectively that lubricated the wheels of bargaining!

Urgent General Assembly:
MSU has called in a mediator

Serious development in bargaining: we NEED to take action. 

MSU has requested a mediator at today's bargaining session. A mediator's job is NOT to get us to agree to a fair contract, it's to get us to agree to a contract QUICKLY. 

MSU wants to end these negotiations.

We want a contract that benefits our members.

We believe that a mediator COULD be beneficial to us IF we show that: 

1. Our proposals are based on accurate data and sound reasoning (they are).
2. Our members are prepared to fight for them, and to fight against cuts to our current benefits and compensation.

We need YOU, and anyone you know who cares about the wellbeing of graduate employees, to come to the Nisbet Building (1407 S. Harrison) TODAY to show the administration, and the mediator, that we will fight for a fair contract.

We will be staging another grade-in from 10-5 TODAY,and at 5 we will gather for an emergency general assembly. Both will take place at Nisbet.

More information HERE. 

The administration wants to:

• Reduce our tuition waiver to 3-3-1 once we've finished our comprehensive exams.
• (We have testimony from faculty and over 350 grad students explaining why this will result in students paying out-of-pocket, taking longer to graduate, etc..)
• Provide us with a healthcare plan that is more expensive than the one we currently have.
• (We live on a tight budget - we can't afford more costly healthcare.)
• Strip us of our dependent subsidies, forcing parents to pay huge out-of-pocket expenses for their children's healthcare.

In addition to fighting the above changes, GEU is fighting for:

• A one-time salary increase for those of us at the bottom of the payscale.
• (Over 50% of our members make less than $15,000 before taxes).
• Yearly salary increases for all TAs that account for the fact that in our last contract negotiations, we accepted VERY small yearly increases due to the 2008 economic crisis.
• To strengthen the anti-harassment language in our contract.

Graduate employees are crucial to university.

There's no reason we need to accept anything less than what we deserve.

Be at Nisbet anytime from 10-5 TODAY to show the university that 

MSU works because we do. 

Be at Nisbet at 5pm for a General Assembly TODAY to 

discuss the administration's proposals and decide on next steps. 

Family, friends, faculty, and other supporters welcome. 

Coffee, food, etc. provided. We can reimburse for childcare.

Updates from the bargaining session that happened during our March for THIS

We wish we could tell you that because of your hard efforts at the march last Friday, MSU has 'seen' the light. In fact, we thought we would be able to tell you this. But while we have some good news about salary, almost everything else we have to share is not so exciting. Please COME TO A GRADE IN this TUESDAY in the building where we have our negotiations, NESBIT HALL. Its a bit of a hike, so if you need a ride, contact us (geu at msu dot org)!


We approached bargaining on Friday with the hope that this would be a productive conversation. Thursday’s bargaining session showed positive movement from the university on the issue of raises- especially the raises for those at the very bottom of the pay scale. The ten percent increases for the very minimums would be a big step towards protecting our most vulnerable TAs, raising the minimum salary for a half-time, academic year TA almost to $14,200. The 1.5 percent annual raises for everyone are considerably better than the earlier .3% proposed raises. For reference, here is where MSU TA salaries currently stand with respect to peer institutions. Many of these institutions already have 3+% salary raises for the next couple years.  So we will need to do better than the current proposal to keep pace once we raise the minimums.

With a little time to look over the full proposal, we did note that many members would still be worse off because of the reduced tuition waiver for students after comps and the removal MSU’s contribution to dependent healthcare premium costs. And so we came to bargaining on Friday intending to discuss those two problems.

MSU’s plan to reduce the tuition to three credits after comps would create a net loss for many doctoral candidates. Currently, post comps students take an average of about 4.2 credits per semester. Paying for extra two or three credits per year would cost from $1,292 to $1,938 a year. While many students might be able to stay below the limit of three credits, there are some programs where this would be nearly impossible. Many departments take comprehensive exams early in their program leaving those students struggling to catch up with 999s. That, in turn, might cause students to delay taking comps, which would increase average time to completion and cost students and the university more money. Any special issue courses that come up later or other class needs might be impossible. OER claims that the people they have spoken to so far say the problems would be minor. It also seems that they have spoken to very few people in the College of Education, College of Social Science, and College of Music. Overall, OER’s proposal to weaken our tuition waiver would push us closer to the bottom of the pile with respect to our Big Ten public institution peers than we already are.

School	Credits Covered by Tuition Waiver
Ohio State	All
Penn State	All
Michigan	All
Rutgers	All
Purdue	All
Illinois	All
Wisconsin	All
Iowa	All
Nebraska	12
Maryland	10
Michigan State	9 (MSU proposal: Only 3 after comps)
Minnesota	6

Any student who needs six credits per semester would see increased out of pocket tuition costs of $3,876 a year at current tuition rates.Note that their proposal drops us to THE VERY BOTTOM OVERALL in the Big10. ...go green.

After a brief caucus we returned to discuss MSU’s contribution to dependent health care costs. MSU claims that because of changes to health insurance regulations, costs for enrolling a spouse will be reduced substantially making the subsidies for premiums unnecessary. While the costs would be reduced for the first year, using MSU’s predictions for premium increases on our health plan we can see that they will be considerably higher than they are now by the end of the contract. And while costs to enroll a spouse will drop temporarily, costs to enroll children will increase immediately. The proposed changes will hurt families. The new cost to enroll two children will be $5,832, an increase of $2,730.

We pointed out which groups would be hurt and that even the reduced costs for spouses are unmanageable on a small salary. Many Teaching Assistants already rely on the food bank or student loans to help get by after paying health premiums for their children.

After a day of conversations about proposals reducing our tuition and health benefits, OER said that we seemed to be asking for everything we already had only better. They suggested we make hard decisions about things like whether or not we buy generic brands and whether or not we add ground beef to our spaghetti sauce. They suggested we make hard decisions, adult decisions, about whether we choose to have children, and whether or not we choose to come to MSU if we already have families.

It is unacceptable for MSU to make graduate education unfeasible for parents. This is not an issue of buying generic brand food, this is an issue of accessible higher education and health insurance for children. Should you, as a woman, have to defer your choice to have a child until you have received your terminal degree? Should you be forced to choose between an education and a high risk (by virtue of mother's age) pregnancy? Should you be forced to choose between the family that you have and continuing your education? MSU seems to believe we should. We are a cheap demographic to insure. Because of the nature of international student visas and a number of other legal constraints, MSU must provide healthcare. And we believe that they shouldn't limit the diversity of people who can receive a graduate degree here by offering limited, non-comprehensive healthcare to us and our families, asking us to assume rising healthcare costs, and protecting their bottom line.

  Sign up for a shift at an upcoming GRADE IN! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UX2I2HxmI343NKlTT82mANHiy6wW9z9BzCSphMtFlRs/viewform