The GEO Contract governs the wages, benefits, working conditions, and other terms of employment for GSIs and GSSAs at the University of Michigan.  The terms of the contract are binding, and employing departments do not have the option of picking and choosing which provisions will be honored.  This website includes the full text of the most recent agreement between GEO and U-M, as well as materials that members can use to enforce their rights under the contract.

Among the rights you are guaranteed as a GSI or GSSA at the University of Michigan are the following:

1. You have the right to all benefits and provisions of the GEO Contract if you are a grad student doing any work relating to the teaching of a class, including grading or mentoring.
2. You have the right to get paid for every hour you work.
3. You have the right to a workplace free of discrimination and to be treated with respect at all times.
4. You have the right to keep your job from the time you accept the offer until you complete the assignment, resign, or are fired with due process.
5. You have the right to paid time off for illness, bereavement, immigration hearings, jury duty, or the birth of a child.
6. You have the right to be paid when subsituting for another GSI or GSSA.
7. You have the right to be supplied with all the materials you need to work, at no cost to you.
8. You have the right to access health, dental, vision and childcare benefits.
9. You have the right to summer health care if you worked the previous two semesters, OR if you worked the preceding winter and the upcoming fall term.
10. You have the right to representation if your rights are violated in any way or you experience problems on the job.

Perhaps most importantly, you have the right that, "where coffee making facilities exist such that Employees have access to and utilize such facilities, Employees shall continue to have access to these facilities." (GEO Contract, Article 22, Section C)

Our contract reflects one core principle of our union: that our teaching is work and we deserve fair compensation for it.  But it also represents something else.  The contract is the product of years of effort by thousands of U-M graduate employees.  These rights, protections, and privileges were not granted to us voluntarily, but were won through years of struggle.  Grad Employees at U-M won their first contract only after a month long strike in 1975.  Highlights included a promise of non-discrimination and the first guarantee of health care benefits for grads on this campus.  To see the progress that we have made over the years -- as well as how far we have yet to go -- tuition waivers are a useful barometer.  The 1983 GEO Contract was the first to include partial tuition waivers for grad employees.  In 1987, two contracts later, GEO won the first full tuition waivers for grad employees with the highest effort fractions.  Today, every grad employee with a .237 or higher fraction recieves a full tuition waiver, but grad employees at lower fractions can still be assessed as much as 59% of tuition.

The current GEO Contract expires March 1, 2011.  As of this writing, in August 2009, GEO is just beginning to put together its bargaining platform for the next contract campaign.  We probably won't do everything in this campaign the same way that we did in the last campaign -- GEO is member driven, and so reinvents itself every year -- but the following document provides insight into the process used to develop our last platform.  It is a letter from Helen Ho, GEO President for the 2007-08 Academic Year, which was printed in the December 2007 edition of The Graduate Worker: