Nominees for Co-Chair:
Shao Yu (Dora) Tseng
Hello fellow workers.
My name is Shao Yu, Tseng (I also go by Dora). I am a second-year master student in Higher Education and Public Policy dual degree program. It is a great honor to be nominated and run for the candidacy for GEO Co-Chair position. With Jyoti’s ongoing efforts and my commitment, I believe two of us can usher in a renewed vitality to the union.
As one of the early organizers in response to the North Village demolishment, I witnessed how the Union stood firm with the minoritized student populations at the most needed time. It was GEO that help mobilize and form the coalition among North Village and Lincoln residents. It was GEO that listened to the student parents’ concerns about the onsite Childcare. It was GEO that made sure that UMass will keep funding the Amherst Family Center. While I enjoy these fruits of the fight, it is the time I ask myself not only what my Union can do for me, but what I can do for my Union.
The housing crisis, job insecurity, lack of summer funding and insufficient childcare support are my most pressing concerns. Being a student parent, international student from Taiwan, and resident of North village, I share similar experience and challenges with many graduate employees at UMass. While we hold different identities, our struggles become apparent and intersect as we make our way in the institution. If I were elected as GEO co-chair, I would dedicate my energy to ensuring workers’ dignity and building toward a socially just campus.
Lastly, I would also use this chance to reach out to the larger Campus community. Thanks to the housing mobilization for North Village and Lincoln, I got to meet many spouses of graduate employees. The economic chain of intelligence and research will not function without the spouses’ dedication to housework and childcare. However, their contribution to the community is trivialized to the point of invisibility. By finding ways to support the families of GEO members we can grow our community and influence the University to build a better, more diverse, equitable, and efficient foundation for education. Which is why we are all here in the first place!
Please consider voting for me as well as the other candidates on my slate. I believe leadership with a mix of experienced union leaders and fresh perspective the members at large can benefit as a whole.
In Solidarity,
Tseng Shao Yu (Dora)
Jyoti Iyer
Hi! I’m Jyoti Iyer, PhD student in Linguistics. I’ve been proud to serve as your GEO Co-Chair this year and department Steward for two years before that. I hope you vote for myself and Dora (Shao Yu, Tseng) for Co-Chairs, and Bilgesu and Mary for the other two positions.
The highlight of my job is conversations with members. I have listened to your needs and drives: when you walked into the office with questions, sought advice on navigating difficult situations with your supervisor, or shared your ideas and we began to build union power together. I’m proud to say that last Fall and earlier this Spring, there was almost no week without an event for members and leadership to hang out. Much member-led organizing and cross-pollination between departments was made possible by conversations over bagels at Up With Workers Wednesday breakfasts, and mobile coffee hours around campus.
Building union power — A tremendous consequence of these spaces created by GEO leadership is the recruitment of over 30 new Stewards, and an increase in member involvement from less active departments. The large number of currently active first years is clearly influenced by a Summer 2019 pilot initiative: “Welcome to your Union” mailers sent to all incoming grad students. A major focus this year was STEM outreach, especially in Engineering(s) – I hope to continue this work in the online format: supporting Stewards now, and laying groundwork for future Stewards. Our power lies in membership numbers, which have remained strong even after the Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision to weaken unions all over the country.
Website and transparency — It was my priority to overhaul the GEO website: Easy access to our contract, bylaws, updated information about union business and bargaining, is indispensable to a transparent democratic process. There are many things I plan to do next year to continue this work.
Coalitions and Bargaining — The role of GEO Co-Chair involves working at the interfaces of various groups. Parents have been impacted this year by uncertainty in North Village, Amherst Family Center, and at the Center for Early Education and Childcare. I look forward to supporting parents in organizing efforts and resuming momentum lost due to the pandemic. Right now, two groups are setting the pace for exciting organizing activity: (1) the campus coalition where I have been working with our International Education striving for socially just treatment of grad students. The main issues that leadership prioritised in prep for Bargaining 2020 are: year-round funding, dignified housing, and no fees for employees.The work of all these people – including Dora, who I have met in all of these forums, and the 70-strong GEO members at bargaining sessions – further underscores the importance of those core issues to address the precarity we all face. I hope to continue this interface work and build union power with you next year. This fight is just getting started.
Nominees for Mobilization Coordinator:
Maria Guarino
Mary Dickman
Dear fellow GEO members,
I am Mary Dickman and I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication. I am thrilled to announce my candidacy for the 2020-2021 GEO Mobilization Coordinator. It has been my pleasure to serve in leadership positions for the last few years, in my current position as the GEO Mobilization Coordinator and as an Organizing & Mobilization Coordinator for the 2017 Bargaining Committee.
In my role as Mobilization Coordinator, I have worked to educate members about our collective bargaining agreement and their rights, increase membership numbers and member engagement, and ensure the democratic functioning of our union. A focus for GEO the last two years has been to build and strengthen the Stewards network. We have been successful in these efforts as we have recruited 35 new department Stewards!
Another project undertook this semester was to identify and recruit potential leaders to chair inactive caucuses. So far, we have reactivated several Caucuses including the ALANA & International Students Caucus, STEM Caucus, Women’s Caucus, and Queer Caucus. We also facilitated the creation of a brand-new caucus the Chinese Speaking Workers’ Caucus. I hope to continue this work in the upcoming academic year with a keen eye toward reactivating the Black Caucus, POC Student Caucus, and Food Security Caucus. As well as facilitating the creation of new identity or issue-based caucuses.
GEO has faced challenges due to the Janus v. AFSMESupreme Court decision which resulted in the immediate lost 600 “agency fee payers” from our membership. Policy experts predicted that union membership would decline across the country but through membership drives, GEO saw an increase to our membership by 200 people. And in the 2 years since the Janus decision, GEO has maintained an average membership of roughly 2,000 dues payers.
I am seeking re-election for GEO’s Mobilization Coordinator to bring my experience and knowledge to our next big fight Bargaining 2020. We have a lot of big demands including campaigns for Dignified Housing, No Fees for Employees, and Year-Round Funding. I hope you will vote for me and other candidates on my slate so we can continue to work on behalf of our fellow GEO members.
Nominations for Steering Committee At-Large:
Herb Susmann
Hello!
I am excited to be running for a seat on the GEO steering committee this year. I have been a rank and file member of GEO since I started at UMass in 2018 in the Biostatistics department, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know the union and its members through the membership meetings and departmental coffee hours.
As a steering committee member, I would like to help the union build on its current success advocating for our members. I am particularly interested in building more capacity for communicating with members through the website and new media projects, like videos and a podcast. I would also like to work on building up our connections with labor at other universities so we can be part of a movement that has each other’s backs as we enter a global recession.
Being a small part of this year’s bargaining process has been a radicalizing experience for me, as I see how hard our union works for us to win concessions from the administration (and how little the administration will do for the people that make this university function.) The thought that has been guiding me recently is that we do not expect nearly enough out of our institutions. I believe it is entirely reasonable to expect our university to provide enough resources for graduate student workers so that we can enjoy a good quality of life and feel economically secure. No matter what we ask for, we will be told that our demands are “unrealistic” or “pie in the sky”. I reject this. What is “unrealistic” to me is a system in which graduate students can’t afford food to eat or pay their rent. Our collective solidarity as a union is our most powerful way to fight for a better reality.
I am lucky to be running on a slate of strong candidates, who I encourage you to vote for. They include members with considerable experience in the union, as well as voices who will bring in new perspectives.
Best,
Herb Susmann
Mohsen Jalali
I’m running for the Steering Committee membership and I’m writing to ask for your vote.
I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Science. I have taught and done research at UMASS for a long time. I’ve represented my department as a steward at GEO and also at the Graduate Student Senate. Now, if I get your vote, I hope I can serve the graduate student body in the steering committee in order to help our UNION to fight for our needs and rights as workers at UMASS. It is a bargaining year. As of now, the union is going through contract negotiations with the university. Contract negotiation with the administration has always been difficult. During this pandemic time, however, it is going to be immensely more difficult.
While it seems that the corona crisis has the UMASS administration to express more understanding of the life condition of the student’s body, the crisis has exacerbated the common uncertainty of the prospect for the student workers at the university. If as a graduate student you are currently working as RA, TA, Postdoc, or hourly laborer, it is less certain how the future would look like for you in the coming semesters. Like always, but this time more, the university is going to ask for more austerity measures and will demand graduate students’ cooperation, i.e. to compromise. This local and global health disaster, however, provides also the opportunity to ask for some specific but significant rights such as healthcare for all graduate students regardless of their employment status and also affordable housing. The pandemic has more than ever exposed these shortcomings in the life of a graduate student.
In certain ways, I know this administration very well. Along with UMASS students (undergraduate and graduate) and faculty members, I campaigned against the current administration policy of banning Iranian students from science and engineering. I hope along with the team that I am running with, we increase the power of our Union and collective action as workers at the UMASS system.
Nefeli Forni-Zervoudaki
I am Nefeli Forni, a second-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature, and I am running for the GEO Steering Committee At-Large position. I have been a GEO member since the Fall of 2018 when I entered UMass, coming from Barcelona. I understand the existence and work of our Union as essential to our personal and professional well-being as graduate students. I believe in the power of collective action and I am convinced of the indispensable role of unionism to guarantee rights as well as transparency and accountability, promoting an ongoing commitment to public education and workplace democracy.
As an international student and citizen of Greece, Uruguay, and Belgium, I am well acquainted with the particular vulnerabilities and bureaucratic hurdles faced by international students. As a student at Universidad de Barcelona, where I earned a Master’s Degree in Gender Studies, I led successful efforts to decrease student workloads and increase student participation in departmental administration, while also volunteering as a teacher for unaccompanied refugee minors. I have extensive experience outside of academia having worked in managerial positions where I advocated for worker rights. Having worked as a film producer for many years, I have great communication skills and executive functioning. A resident of North Village and domestic partner to a student-parent, I understand the diversity of needs represented by GEO. I am co-chair of my Department’s GSO and have been an active participant in current GEO bargaining sessions. I am a confident public speaker and negotiator, not afraid of conflict and energetic in my engagements. Informed by intersectional theory and the politics of precarity, I understand and am a fierce advocate for the needs of diverse and vulnerable communities.
As a member of the GEO Steering Committee, I will work tirelessly with leadership to ensure job and housing security, trust in our institutions, and engage our membership in decision-making processes and different forms of collective mobilization. In this time of global crisis, I believe in the power of working collectively to advocate for GEO’s current and future demands.
Antonis Gounalakis
Hello fellow graduate student-workers,
My name is Antonis Gounalakis and I am a 4 th year Ph.D. candidate in Economics. I have been honored to serve on the Steering Committee (unpaid position) the last two years and currently I am the only unpaid member in our Bargaining Committee. I have been a steward for my department for 3 years now, always advocating for the interests and concerns of my fellow workers and as an international student (from Greece) myself I am also adversely affected by many of the extremely anti-immigrant changes that the current administration pushes.
For those of you who have participated in membership/steward meetings or the recent bargaining sessions, you know that there are many issues that I care deeply and feel passionate about regarding our union, including its priorities and strategy. My personal views as a graduate student-worker, is that the union leadership always needs to steer the union in order to align with the needs and wants of its members in a democratically-run, member-driven union –so 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 them engaged in every step of the process, with much higher participation rates than the current ones (in meetings, actions, elections etc) .
Right now we are living through unprecedented times, with the COVID-19 pandemic, the subsequent quarantine, the financial impact and the inadequate response from both the government and the UMass administration. We are currently in the process of the “impact bargaining”, and so far the administration’s response has been straight up insulting. We are asking for summer funding, given the unprecedented times of stay-at-home order, travel restrictions (especially for internationals), and huge unemployment, in order to sustain ourselves (pay rent, food, other necessary expenses), and they are
offering us peanuts. International students are dealing with the suspension of visa services and the fact that they have received 0$ in financial support so far. The University, as the landlord in the cases of North Village and Lincoln, is actually trying to evict people by June 1 st in violation of state law (“Moratorium”). Moreover, the administration is unwilling to commit to job security for the next year, using austerity arguments that I, as a Greek, am too familiar and rather sick of hearing for more than a decade now. Our strong response should be to demand, given that UMass Amherst has over 360 million dollars in endowment, that the administration spends part of this to support the members of our community that are in dire situations. In order to achieve, we will need strong member presence in bargaining sessions and further actions.
Lastly, I sincerely hope that you will consider voting for me and Nefeli Forni-Zervoudaki for Steering and for Thomas Corcoran for Membership Organizer. I believe that our slate brings new perspective to the table, regarding the challenges that we are facing, allowing us at the same time to have some necessary continuity and experience in our leadership positions.
Nominations for Membership Organizers:
Bilgesu Sumer
Hello fellow union folks,
It gives me immense joy to announce my candidacy for the GEO membership organizer position for the year 2020-2021. I have served in this position since September 2019. I have met many of you during department orientations, coffee hours and membership meetings that I have been part of organizing. I know all our department stewards and work with them closely and I have seen thirty-five new stewards join our union’s leadership structure.
For those who do not know me, I am a doctoral candidate in the department of political science and an international student from Turkey. Since I began this position I feel strongly that I am part of a group of extremely talented staff members and a member-driven union that gets its power from its commitment to social justice and economic equality. I want to keep being part of this momentum and finalize the projects that we have started. Thus I am running for the GEO membership organizer position for another term.
During my work as GEO officer, I have been especially focussed on advocating for better housing options for our members, ever since the university declared they were going to demolish graduate student housing units. I believe that the university has the duty to provide dignified housing for its workers and that we should not be paying more than half of our paychecks for rent and utilities. To push for these demands, I have reached out to organizations outside the campus and began to work with them as a coalition demanding fair housing for all since last fall. With the global pandemic, I feel more strongly about the responsibility of the administration for ensuring affordable accommodations, as they have transformed our already bad living conditions into our workspaces!
I would like you to consider voting for me as well as other candidates on my slate. We are running together with the goal of forming a union leadership that has both experience and a fresh perspective to bring to the table for winning our demands. As of now, the union is going through contract negotiations with the university. My running members and I have been involved in this process since its start. We also weathered our organization through the shift to a virtual university. We would like to continue doing our work thus I am asking for your approval of my running mates too!
In Solidarity,
Bilgesu Sümer
Thomas Corcoran
My name is Tom Corcoran, a graduate student in the department of sociology running for the GEO membership mobilization coordinator position in this year’s election. Since my arrival at UMass in the fall of 2015, I have maintained a spirited commitment to union membership with GEO, as well as dedication to the needs and well-being of fellow student-workers. Taking into consideration my devotion to the union and its members, I will elaborate upon my qualifications and experiences below, to explain why I believe I am best suited to serve as membership mobilizing coordinator.
Prior to beginning graduate studies at UMass, I worked as an electrician with a large building trades union in New York City. My experiences in the industry, along with the relationships I developed among fellow workers, shaped my outlook towards fostering workplace democracy and union inclusivity. The worksites I frequented throughout the city presented unique spaces to learn about the intersections of identities, political views, and interpretations of union representation. While I did not hold a position as a steward or union delegate, I frequently relied upon my commitment to good unionism when fellow workers were either in need of information about union bargaining procedures or confronted with harassment from supervision and/or hostile co-workers. Often, this practice entailed building close relationships with members viewed as outsiders in the workplace, namely (im)migrants, people of color, women, and those with alternative gender and sexual identities. In addition to the experiences and qualifications outlined above, I served as a GEO steward in the department of sociology during the 2016-2017 academic year. Throughout this period, I maintained close contact with graduate students in the department, encouraging regular attendance at union meetings and collective actions. As membership mobilization coordinator, I will bring this experience to support the needs of GEO members while helping to build an active membership base.
By now, we are all well aware of UMass administrators’ recent announcements to impose further budget cuts and measures of fiscal austerity on university operations. Graduate students find themselves amongst the most vulnerable groups during this time, faced with uncertainty and anxiety surrounding employment reductions, restrictions on international travel, and access to affordable housing. As a resident of North Village Housing, my spouse and I are directly affected by these plans. Over the course of the last seven months, since the announcement of North Village and Lincoln Apartment’s closure, I have remained active in GEO mobilizations to demand UMass offer affordable family and student housing as they construct new facilities on campus. In my role as mobilization coordinator, I will continue to support GEO demands on graduate student housing and any intention to write housing affordability into the collective bargaining agreement. Furthermore, I will actively support all demands to expand summer funding and employment for graduate students, as well as advocate for international students’ rights under these exceptional circumstances.
I ask you to please take into consideration my qualifications, experiences, and commitment to GEO membership when voting in this election. Thank you for your support!
