Fellow GEO members,
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, GEO has maintained that graduate workers know better than anyone else what it means for a workplace—a lab, a classroom, a dorm—to be safe. Since we began impact bargaining with the University in March of 2020, our members have made it clear what kinds of things UMass would have to do to ensure the safety of graduate workers and the rest of the campus community. We’ve repeatedly demanded expanded access to family medical leave; hazard pay for in-person grad workers; PPE to be provided by the University to everyone on campus; and, above all, an overhaul in the process for granting remote work accommodations. All of these measures would make it possible for GEO members to come to work and do our jobs. But the University has refused to work with us on most of these things. As a result, UMass Amherst has become an even more inaccessible and unsafe place to work than ever before.
GEO members have been “not reappointed” to teaching positions due to problems with processing accommodations in a timely fashion. In other cases, we have been told not to seek accommodations for remote work at all; that remote work is out of the question—which is blatantly false. Still others have been harassed by their supervisors and instructed to report to work after testing positive for COVID or being exposed to someone who’s tested positive: a flagrant violation of University policy. This kind of gatekeeping and abuse has no real purpose other than to force our members back onto campus so UMass can pretend that the pandemic is over. This is par for the course for UMass: throughout the pandemic their number-one priority has been protecting their bottom line, not the health and safety of the campus community. The goal has always been to return to “business as usual” as quickly as possible—meaning a full reopening of campus—regardless of the risks involved. And the risks remain considerable.
During the Fall 2021 semester, UMass has tried to mitigate—not stop—the spread of COVID. The University has relied on a combination of a vaccine mandate for all faculty, staff, and students; an indoor mask mandate; and voluntary testing protocols (which have been scaled back drastically since the spring of 2021). Week after week, in emails from the pandemic PR machine, nefariously branded the Public Health Promotion Center, we are reminded that the rates of vaccination are astonishingly high; that rates of hospitalizations are very low. “Vaccines remain the best public health tool available to protect you from COVID-19,” wrote Ann Becker and Jeff Hescock in an email on December 23—at the very moment the omicron variant was causing yet another surge in COVID cases, including a record number of breakthrough infections for vaccinated individuals.
GEO recognizes the efficacy of the vaccines in reducing the chances of life-threatening illness—for those who are fortunate enough to have access to vaccines. But the vaccines do not prevent illness entirely. Nor does being vaccinated stop someone from spreading COVID to those of us who are not yet or cannot yet be vaccinated, such as children under 5, or our friends and families in countries where vaccines are not yet widely available (if they’re available at all). Until the United States and other major imperialist powers end the program of vaccine apartheid and the hoarding of necessary medical supplies, the most vulnerable members of our community will remain vulnerable. The pandemic is far from over.
GEO maintains that an injury to one is an injury to all. We are committed to fighting for the health and safety of everyone in the campus community—and beyond. Vaccines are one of the weapons in this fight. We need a multifaceted and comprehensive approach; we need to stop the pandemic, not just mitigate its effects on “business as usual.” We need to put people ahead of profits. This is why we believe that graduate workers should not need medical documentation or a formal accommodation letter to receive a remote work option. In fact, we shouldn’t even have to go through an accommodations process at all: we should have the latitude to decide how to safely do our jobs. We should not have to worry about retaliation from our supervisors or our department heads when we make these decisions. And in instances where formal accommodations exist, no one should have to worry about “not being reappointed” because a supervisor doesn’t feel like going through the trouble of making a reasonable accommodation.
Given the severity of the omicron and delta surges, along with the immense pressure these surges exert on our healthcare system, GEO also demands that the University elect for remote instruction for Spring 2022. Several universities and colleges such as Harvard, Amherst College, and Smith College, have elected to conduct the majority of their classes remotely for the first few weeks of the upcoming semester. GEO affirms that shifting to remote learning until the surges subside is the safest way for graduate workers to continue doing their jobs—on and off campus. Restricting the number of people on campus will also allow RAs who need to access labs to conduct their work in a safe manner.
If you or your coworkers are being forced to work in unsafe conditions, let us know immediately! Write to your geo.
