Fellow workers,
Below please find candidate statements for the ongoing GEO elections for leadership and the bargaining committee. GEO members eligible to vote in this election will receive a voter ID and instructions later today via email; please keep an eye out for an email from ElectionRunner. If you have any questions, feel free to contact the Elections Committee at elections.
In solidarity,
The GEO Elections Committee
GEO Co-Chair
Madison Albano
I am Madison Albano and I am excited to run for the position of GEO Co-Chair. Since arriving at UMass in Fall of 2023, I have faced a great deal of financial insecurity from the high cost of housing and food in the River Valley region. This led me to organize tirelessly with GEO because I am committed to fighting for fair wages for all graduate workers.
As a History Department Steward, I held Know Your Rights trainings for my fellow graduate students and supported them in grievance processes. I worked hard as a leader in the Contract Action Campaign by speaking with hundreds of member and learning about key issues that graduate students of all departments and backgrounds face. I helped plan a housing rally that over 300 students and community members attended in support of our bargaining demands for COLA and a housing stipend.
As Co-Chair, I would increase member participation throughout campus to ensure that all graduate students can participate in union organizing and decision-making. To do this, I want to help strengthen the Stewards’ Network by identifying and training leaders in every department on campus who can best connect their peers with GEO organizing. I would also make sure that all Steward’s Assemblies and General Membership Meetings are as accessible and engaging as possible through stronger meeting facilitation and consistent communication. All meetings will be hybrid and all meeting notes will be transparent and easy to find. As we know, graduate students have extremely busy schedules. Juggling teaching responsibilities with coursework and personal life is difficult work, but so is building a strong, democratic union that fights for the rights of all graduate workers.
To increase membership numbers, we will begin the semester with a large Membership Drive to connect all new graduate workers with the exciting work and events that GEO has to offer. But it isn’t enough to just increase our numbers – GEO needs to be a place where every member, new and returning, feels welcome and empowered. The life of a graduate student is alienating and stressful, but through social events like “GEO prom,” trivia night, karaoke night, film screenings, and more, we can build a community that supports graduate students. All graduate students should have the opportunity to build relationships with other students outside of their departments, and I want GEO to serve as a space of connection. GEO is only as strong as the relationships we build with each other.
Together, we will develop training workshops to equip our members with the skills and confidence to effectively organize their coworkers around workplace struggles. I also promise to hold political education sessions, Know Your Rights and Contract trainings, reading groups, and labor documentary nights to empower any member to become a stronger union leader.
As Co-Chair, I will work to empower ALL of our members to become labor leaders. With our collective effort, we will transform GEO into a democratic union and fight together for our rights as graduate workers. Solidarity forever!
Lyndsey Saunders
My name is Lyndsey Saunders, and I am running for co-chair for the 2024-2025 academic year. As a second-year Ph.D. student in the Sociology Program, this past academic year was my first year being a part of GEO. In this time, I paid close attention to how differently members responded to collective action efforts within the union. Member experiences vary greatly by race, gender identity, department, citizenship status, access to financial support outside of our contract, sexual orientation, and many more important factors I have not explicitly listed. Approaching the role of co-chair with these experiences in mind can only make us stronger, especially considering how closely our intersectional experiences as graduate students here are intertwined with the success and day to day operations of GEO.
I see my potential role as co-chair as a vessel; As a second year student, I don’t think I should be the loudest voice in the room when it comes to decision-making. However, I have the capabilities to strengthen communication networks within the union and provide multiple touchpoints for graduate students to get involved, whether they have been active for four weeks or four years. The ability to discern when to step up and step back to amplify others’ voices is crucial for this to happen, and I believe that is a strength of mine that I could bring into this position. This especially includes meeting graduate students who were more involved in the past to better contextualize how to move forward in our bargaining process. Right now, we are about to enter a mediation process, so every action made by GEO going forward should be carefully considered and strategic.
Recently, I was able to initiate this goal through the collaborative creation of a membership feedback survey that will be used to plan a rank and file member-driven retreat this summer. It has been great to see how GEO leadership responded to this type of rank and file initiative, and through my work in this position, I hope it will continue. This long overdue temperature check of the union will provide a platform for members who have wanted to get involved, but may not know how. Additionally, it is a platform for rank and file members to hold our elected leadership accountable to address the strengths and pain points of this previous year.
The number of smaller committee and caucus networks can sometimes lead to different priorities between the rank and file members and elected leadership. While unintentional, this necessitates consistent efforts by GEO to provide opportunities for member engagement and feedback. If elected as co-chair, I will continue this work alongside other rank and file members and leadership to ensure that we are more unified in our contract goals, that we are considering all vulnerabilities of our bargaining unit, and that we are streamlining communication across the different networks to improve transparency and accountability within the union.
I look forward to winning a historic contract with all of you.
In solidarity,
Lyndsey Saunders
Bargaining Organizing and Mobilization Coordinator
Isaac Pliskin
Hello Fellow GEO Members,
My name is Isaac Pliskin, and I just finished my third year as a PhD student in the Physics Department. I am running for the position of Bargaining Organizing & Mobilization Coordinator because I believe that my commitment to communication and transparency within GEO will be beneficial to our current contract negotiations.
As we enter into mediation it is imperative that the lines of communication between the bargaining committee and the members of GEO are strong. The way that membership interacts with the administration’s bargaining team, interacts with our bargaining team, and organizes will change over the summer and during the mediation process. With this change, as well as the fact that organizing during the summer is always more difficult, it will be important for membership to have full trust in the bargaining team. Strong communication will go a long way towards rebuilding trust within GEO.
So far GEO has done a good job with public facing communications such as social media and reaching out to new members. That being said, there is room for us to grow when it comes to our internal communications. It will be hard over the summer to keep members updated on the progress of negotiations, and this is an area that I think I will be able to help. I am committed to providing timely, clear, and detailed updates to the membership throughout the bargaining and mediation process.
My goal is to help the membership of GEO win a contract that we can be proud of despite going into mediation, as well as one that membership feels it has had a say in. So far in our contract campaign there have been occasional solicitations for member input, but there are still members who feel as though they are not being heard. I plan to do everything I can to make sure that all members are informed, included, and heard during bargaining committee meetings, caucuses, and all other possible forums.
I believe that we as a union have the infrastructure to support the level of communication needed for our ongoing contract negotiations. In the role of Bargaining Organizing and Mobilization Coordinator I hope to use that infrastructure to the best of my ability to win the contract that we deserve.
In solidarity,
Isaac Pliskin
Aidan Khelil
My name is Aidan Khelil, and I’m a PhD student in the physics department. I am running for a position on the bargaining committee
My involvement in GEO began as soon as I matriculated into UMass. In the Summer of 2022, before I ever set foot in a classroom I participated in the move-in week action where we rallied for better wages and educated parents about the struggles graduate workers face. This action resulted in management improving their contract offer. Since then, I have found other ways to get involved in GEO such as becoming a part of the Contract Action Team and an elected steward for the physics department.
For the past several months, myself and several of my peers have grown frustrated with the lack of a data-driven approach to bargaining. As a result, I have formed a preliminary data team with several other physics grads where we utilize a numbers-driven approach to determine what our contract demands should be to remain competitive with peer institutions. We are also committed to developing effective and accessible communication strategies regarding our data results to rank and file members.
For months, I have been heading both the data collection and the analysis process of the nascent GEO data team. I have personally spent months collecting data on the minimum stipends given to graduate workers at ten peer institutions. I have also been in direct contact with The Council for Community and Economic Research, an organization that provides accurate state-and county-wide cost-of-living data. Through my communications with this organization and with UMass Libraries, I personally obtained, for free, the 2024 cost-of-living data for every county in the United States. While these data would ordinarily cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, I am working with UMass Libraries to secure access to them for all UMass students so that we may consider the local cost of living in all future contract negotiations.
On top of these analyses, I have been collecting publicly-available budgetary information on all of UMass’s peer institutions. UMass is currently running a historic surplus, the second-largest surplus out of all peer institutions. In fact, most of our peers run no surplus or even a net deficit! If UMass was truly trying to match our peers, they would turn their surplus into necessary wage increases for their grad workers.
As a member of the Bargaining Committee, I hope to turn much of my in-depth data-driven approach into a consistent message to management, but even more importantly, a consistent message to membership. I believe in the power of data to strongly inform our decision-making and unite membership into the collective bargaining powerhouse that we know we can be.
I believe we desperately need a stronger numbers-driven approach to bargaining and organizing, and I believe the work of myself and my peers can perfectly fulfill that requirement and really solidify our bargaining power going forward.
In Solidarity,
Aidan Khelil
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In solidarity, GEO Leadership
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