Fellow workers,
Below please find the candidate statements for the GEO officer positions for the 2022-2023 academic year. These will also be posted on the GEO website, and available to read at the polling stations in the Campus Center and outside the membership meeting on May 1 from 3-5pm (Location TBA very soon!). Voting will take place online, via ElectionRunner, beginning Thursday, April 27, and will conclude at 3:30pm on May 1. For troubleshooting/other questions with the online election, or in order to cast a challenged ballot in the case of election records discrepancies, there will be Elections Committee office hours in Campus Center 915 on Thursday and Friday. The Elections Committee will also be available from 2:30-3:30 outside the general meeting to answer questions and help out.
Most of the positions open for election were not contested, meaning that the candidates who did nominate themselves were elected by acclamation. The Elections Committee nevertheless asked these candidates to provide statements in order to introduce themselves to GEO members and to share their vision of union work for the coming year. In the case of the cochairs, because two or fewer candidates ran for these positions, we will need to hold a special meeting of the Stewards Assembly to vet these candidates rather than to elect them by acclamation. This meeting will be open to all members in good standing and will likely take place over Zoom.
The ballot will feature the one contested election, for the open bargaining committee position.
If you have any questions at all—about voting, about the special Stewards’ Assembly meeting, about candidate statements, or about GEO elections more broadly—please write to elections.
In solidarity,
GEO Elections Committee
CANDIDATE STATEMENTS
GEO CO-CHAIRS (2)
Ragini Jha
My name is Ragini Jha and I am a PhD candidate in the History Department. In the past I have been a steward of my department for two years and a Steering Committee member for a year. I served as co-chair of the first ALANA International Caucus after around eight years of inactivity and revived it during the first year of the pandemic. In all these positions I have been committed to serving the interests of my fellow workers through department and university level organizing, contributions to impact bargaining during Covid, and solidarity building. I would be grateful to serve as your co-chair in the coming year to build a participatory union and fight for a strong contract.
As co-chair I am committed to preserving and maintaining the institutional infrastructure of GEO to ensure maximum, proactive, democratic participation by our members. In communication with the Steering Committee, Joint Council of UAW 2322 and our strong organized network of caucuses, committees and stewards I look forward to advocating for our membership to the fullest extent possible. I will also ensure transparency and accountability by maintaining an up to date website with appropriate contact information of our representatives, contract, dues, meetings and events. Additionally, I will ensure regular communications to our membership through newsletters and social media. I will also strive for solidarity and coalition building with unions within campus and in the Pioneer Valley, but also other graduate student organizations on campus which represent a diversity of students/workers.
The coming year is crucial in more than one way. Cost of living and rent burden are on a consistent rise. We are seeing increased costs of tuition and a decline in funding and benefits. UMass’ policies fit a pattern of cost of living crisis across universities. But this is also a moment when student workers are mobilizing against financial precarity. As we enter bargaining year, I believe it is crucial to articulate appropriate responses to UMass’ increasingly harsh policies by collective organizing and contract gains. The more we organize the greater our wins.
I believe strongly that equity in our workspace requires recognising our different positionalities and needs. Meaningful union work involves countering racism, sexism and xenophobia every step of the way. One way is to support and extend our caucuses to ensure that the concerns and issues of graduate workers across the board are surveyed, addressed, represented and also brought to the table for bargaining. I also commit to learning about and advocating for the interests of the membership across departments– humanities, social sciences, STEM, management and others– in a transparent, democratic and accountable manner. Ultimately a union must be driven by the collective needs, interests, and priorities of its membership. In this upcoming bargaining year, I will work toward this vision of a member-driven and participatory unit which I will represent to the best of my abilities as co-chair.
In solidarity,
Ragini
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Hannah Ku
My name is Hannah Ku and I am a first-year master’s student in the history department. I am running for the position of GEO Co-Chair alongside Ragini, Antonis, Emelia, and Thomas.
I am currently one of the stewards representing the history department, a member of the organizing committee, and previously a member of the elections committee. I have been engaging in organizing efforts at University Village, a graduate family housing complex, to advocate alongside and for residents asking for lower rent and regular maintenance. Additionally, I recently volunteered to table at the Student Parent Program in Kendrick Park, Amherst MA, where we provided information about housing code violations to parents.
Within my own department, I participated in a collective action alongside other first-year masters students to address larger issues in the department concerning funding transparency and changes to the reappointment process.
As this next year is a bargaining year, increased and active participation in GEO is essential. My hope is to make GEO a more inclusive space that is truly representative of our diverse student body. This includes more active outreach in departments and organizations to address the various ways the university attempts to undercut our collective bargaining power (i.e., no protections for grad hourly positions, traineeships, 4+1 programs, etc.).
In solidarity,
Hannah
MEMBERSHIP ORGANIZERS (2)
Thomas Morrison
I am a 2nd year PhD student in Philosophy. I have been an active member involved in bargaining and organizing since Summer 2022. I have previous experience organizing adjunct teachers in Kansas City and have been involved in labor and civil rights actions for over a decade.
My vision for GEO in this position is to put three core issues at the focus of the next year. These issues are multi-year projects, but I’d like to contribute what I can to pushing the goal post forward.
First, the issue of Alienation: talking to many graduate workers at UMass, it is clear that many think of GEO as some third-party organization on campus. GEO is not some group that stands in between grad workers and the admins. GEO is you! GEO is just grad student workers that are organized. That means that the only difference between GEO and any grad student is the level to which they’re organized with others to fight for their needs. I want to take down this sense of alienation from GEO. It only serves to isolate individual grad workers and hold back the power of our organized efforts.
Second, the issue of Representation: as you can see by this year’s slate of candidates, a lot of GEO officers and even active participants are from non-STEM fields and not BIPOC or folks of other marginalized groups. This is not to erase the important few that are. My vision for GEO going forward is that it truly represents the grad worker population on campus, both marginalized folks and workers from all the diverse departments. We are all workers here at UMass, and we need all our voices to address our labor conditions in a just way.
Finally, the issue of Awareness: I want more grad workers to know not just that something can be done to address our unfair labor conditions but how to do something about it. Every grad worker knows that we face serious issues around overwork, housing (rent burden and insecurity), food insecurity, discrimination, harassment, blatant contract violations, poor wages, etc.. And we know that it is even worse given that the administration leverages our murky status as both workers and students to get what they want out of us. They treat us as workers when they need the university to run and as students who should feel “lucky” to be at a “prestigious institution” when we ask for dignified treatment and fair compensation in return. My vision for the next year is to raise awareness of how an individual grad worker can do something about it, even just small things. To that end, I want to explore and promote less demanding forms of participation. We don’t all have time to sit on a committee every week, and that should not close the door on your participation. I want to explore different styles of participation. Sometimes political action is not just talking or planning events, but making art, sharing food, standing by someone having an issue in your department. In general, I want people to feel connected to GEO even if they can’t always participate. It should be a low threshold to be able to do something about these issues, because your help (at whatever level and frequency) is invaluable!
I am excited to get to know more of you going forward and to contribute to achieving these goals! Solidarity!”
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Emilia Miller
My name is Emelia (ze/hir/hirs), and I am a doctoral candidate in the Philosophy department. I am running for GEO membership organizer. As we prepare to enter bargaining for our next contract, my goal in serving GEO in this position are to build our power as a union by working with department stewards to organize their colleagues around the particular issues faced by GEO members in their departments. By building organized engagement within and between those departments we can back up our demands in bargaining with our collective power as union workers.
The fact of the matter is that our members, and our fellow graduate workers who are not yet members, are struggling to survive, let alone thrive, in the present working conditions at UMass. Many of us work for UMass as graduate instructors, research assistants, assistant residence directors, or graduate fellows while simultaneously having the university as their landlord. Some of us pay upwards of seventy percent of their stipends to UMass for the privilege of living in the same place where their labor is exploited for the benefit of the university. This is unconscionable in itself, but it is especially unconscionable when international graduate students are unable to seek additional employment to supplement their remaining income due to the conditions of their visas. As the largest employer in Western Massachusetts, and as a largely residential university, UMass Amherst sets the terms for the local housing market, and the administration has shown absolutely no intention of addressing the exorbitant rents it collects from the workers whose labor allows this university to function.
Make no mistake, our labor is fully and absolutely crucial to our employer. Without us, the University would not be able to offer nearly enough 100 level courses, grading for large lectures would be impossible, residence halls would be unsupervised, and the laboratory research that generates over one billion dollars annually for this institution would not happen. Because of this we have the power to make our situation better, and we have the potential to multiply that power through collective action in support of bargaining. UMass works because we do, and we will show them that as often as it takes to meet our needs.
In order to do that, we as a union need to be present in the lives of our fellow workers. We need to demonstrate as often as necessary that GEO makes our lives and working conditions better, but that it can only do that through the actions of the members. GEO is not an entity that stands between us and the administration, acting on our behalf. GEO is us, and we must act for ourselves and each other.
Solidarity forever, the union makes us strong.
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MOBILIZATION COORDINATOR (1)
Antonis Gounalakis
Hello fellow graduate student-workers,
My name is Antonis Gounalakis, and I am a Ph.D. student in Economics. I currently serve as the GEO Mobilization Coordinator, and I have been involved with GEO since my first year, as a steward for my department and on the Steering Committee. In these positions, I have continuously advocated for the interests and concerns of my fellow workers, and as an international student myself I am aware of the complexities and difficulties related to the immigration status that affect us as both students and as workers.
For those of you who have participated in membership/steward meetings, you know that there are many issues that I care about deeply regarding our union, including its priorities and strategy. My personal view, as a graduate student-worker, is that union leadership must steer the union in order to align with the needs and wants of its members. As GEO is a democratically-run, member-driven union, it is crucial to have transparency and accountability in any action (or inaction) that we take. GEO should always aim to increase its member base, while keeping members engaged in every step of the process. Ideally, I would like to foster higher participation rates than we have currently (in meetings, actions, elections etc).
In the last year, we have made a systematic and considerable effort to reverse the negative effects of the pandemic in terms of union membership and participation. We collectively bargained and signed a new contract in the fall with higher wages (7.69% increase), back pay in the form of lump sum payments for the previous two years, one-time lump sum (Covid payment) and a 50% reduction in graduate service fee. Additionally, we have finally succeeded in including the Prestigious Graduate Fellows in our bargaining unit after 10 years of fighting, and we successfully combated the efforts of the administration to weaken existing language in our contract. Nevertheless, as I have personally experienced, especially the last year, the University is willing to go to great lengths to undermine the existing contract in numerous ways (wage increases, back pay, inclusion in the bargaining unit, dental vision benefits etc). There are still outstanding issues that affect a significant number of our members that we will need to organize in order to address (workload, inclusion in the bargaining unit etc). We need to be vigilant in order to make sure that we enforce both the letter and the spirit of the contract in the most inclusive way possible, while also trying to make its scope more expansive and the language even stronger.
We are entering a year of bargaining, and we will need everyone’s input in order to make it work. Every worker that decides to join the union, every person that shows up for any event, anyone who chooses to spend even one hour of their time is building power for the collective and is contributing to get a better contract that will substantially improve the material conditions for all current and future graduate student-workers. We are all impacted by the rising cost of living, the exorbitant rents, where the University plays its own destructive role as the leading landlord in the area with the “affordable” family housing, and the compounding effect of the annual increases on various bogus fees that are deducted from our paychecks in order to pay off University’s debt. Funding and graduate assistantships in general are becoming more stringent and conditional for existing graduate students. At the same time, the University and several of its departments (i.e. Computer Science, Education, Isenberg, Engineering Depts) are enriching themselves by admitting an ever-increasing volume of terminal master students, most of whom are international students, who are treated like cash cows and their own departments actively deny them any graduate assistantships on campus in order to protect their tuition revenue.
The fight against structural inequities and financial precarity can only be successful through solidarity in action by the broadest coalition possible among the graduate student workers and our allies that will represent all of our members, especially those who are traditionally most marginalized. Union work is tantamount to empowering workers and that can only happen if we combat every aspect of racism, patriarchy, xenophobia, and discrimination wherever we may encounter it. A holistic and intersectional analysis that takes into account the different identities, perspectives and interests among us is a prerequisite for a successful organizing and bargaining strategy, which will allow us to advance our collective interests and will bring us closer to a better and more equitable work, academic and living environment.
Antonis Gounalakis
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BARGAINING COMMITTEE: ORGANIZING AND MOBILIZING COORDINATOR (1)
Oliver (Olly) Kelly
I am writing in order to enumerate the reasons I could be an ideal candidate for the Bargaining Mobilizing and Organizing Coordinator. GEO has been extremely instrumental in supporting me in my last two years of employment at the university, and this is something I’d like to contribute on the behalf of others. I am currently in the process of negotiating better conditions with GEO within my specific role in residential life, doing many of the requirements of this position on my own accord.
My undergraduate education also took place at UMass, meaning I am going on my seventh year of being involved in the university community. My B.A. was in Social Thought Political Economy, which equipped me well to deal with the realities of how political and economic structures mold our society and the power structures within it. My second major was Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, allowing me to further my understanding of global dynamics of privilege and oppression, and to explore nuanced, intersectional ways of being, and how power systems react to shifting demands and represented populations. Collectively, I believe these studies allow me to bring an equity-based lens to the work we do, and utilize my understanding of historical worker’s movements to assist the work we currently intend to do.
Currently, my enrollment in Dual-Masters programs Higher Education and Public Policy Administration uniquely situated me to this position’s responsibilities. Learning more of the history and structure of higher education has given me a better understanding of the institutional nature of higher education spaces, and what tools have systematically been used to oppress higher education students and workers. My time in the Public Policy Administration program has provided additional understanding of how policies produce and maintain inequity, and the language with which to make change via official channels. The combination of these studies suits me well to organize and mobilize around issues of rules and policy within our graduate working environment.
My position as a Learning Communities Graduate situated me well to communicate with others to hear their concerns and to effectively involve them in bargaining processes. I have held work positions all throughout my full-time educational endeavors, meaning I have excellent time management and productivity skills.The nature of working, attending school at, and living in the same place provides a distinct position for understanding how the university operates at several levels. I have first-hand experience of being subjected to unfair working conditions, mobilizing other workers to negotiate, and taking a stand in order to produce change. Though often a tiring and uphill battle, I believe this is more of the work that needs to be done, and it is important that others feel important and empowered enough within their union to have their voices heard.
Thank you so much for your time and energy in considering my candidacy.
In Solidarity,
Olly Kelly
Andre Kenneth “Chase” Randall
Greetings, I consider it an honor and privilege to introduce myself as Andre Kenneth Chase Randall (“Chase” preferred name usage). As a doctoral student in the Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences, I respectfully seek your support for me as a member of our upcoming bargaining committee. My prior background experience uniquely prepares me to serve as your voice. Here’s why:
Coming from Atlanta (arguably the cradle of the civil rights movement in the United States), I served in many civic engagement roles on the federal, state, county, city, and neighborhood levels. I volunteered under the tutelage of civil rights icon Congressperson John Lewis, where I witnessed the interpersonal dynamics that create “good trouble”.
In 2012, I served as a campaign manager for State Representative Keisha Sean Waites (D- Atlanta), who ran as an open lesbian. During my work with Representative Waites, Governor Nathan Deal (Republican) held a signing ceremony for House Bill 5 that she introduced during the 2013 legislative session. As you may know, a governor retains not only the exclusive power to sign a bill into law but also the right to conduct a discretionary signing ceremony. Therefore, a Republican Governor conducting a signing ceremony for an openly lesbian Democrat in the South remains (to me) the “fine art of getting things done”.
On an academic level, I served as a master’s student Project Rwanda Ambassador where I traveled to Kigali, Rwanda. As a Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) student-led initiative from CMU Pittsburgh, CMU Qatar, and CMU Africa students, the Project Rwanda Ambassadors brainstormed on a best practice approach for teaching tech skills to primary and secondary education teachers with limited tech access. During the stay, our computer literacy outreach gained the attention of His Excellency Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda. President Kagame gave us an audience that later gained nationwide attention.
To be clear, teamwork makes the dream work. That being said, please select me as your choice for a Bargaining Mobilizing and Organizing Coordinator. As you see, I possess the skills useful for researching, drafting, discussing, and advocating concerns that serve the greater community good. We accomplish much more working collectively than individually. Should you want, I welcome “personal” dialogue on social @technicalCHASE. In advance, thank you for the support.
Yours in the joy of service, Chase.
