CROPPED

Available at: bit.ly/geo-w2r-faq

This document will be edited as we raise new questions and answer them. Please send questions you have about work-to-rule as well as what you encounter in the course of working to rule to the Work-to-Rule committee cochairs:
Nefeli Zervoudaki  (nefeli@geouaw.org) and David W. Pritchard (david@geouaw.org). 

If you haven’t already, you can fill out the survey here

QUICKLINKS

What is work-to-rule? Work-to-rule is an on the job action where employees do exactly what is stated in the written rules, procedures, and the contract—but nothing more—to put pressure on the employer to agree to a fair contract (in this case, UMass Administration/Management). This may slow down operations or annoy our managers, but it is a widespread and effective union strategy. Through work-to-rule, we demonstrate to management just how important our work is, and how much overwork we do—including the work before our appointment begins. 
Work-to-rule is not a refusal to perform labor that we agreed to do in our contract; it is a refusal to do anything more than that. While no job action comes without risk, working to rule is protected because we’re following the rules, unlike a strike, which breaks them. This might inconvenience professors, but they are also workers affected by admins’ bad choices. Their union, MSP, will be circulating a statement of solidarity for their members to sign. We can make our action stronger by working in coalition. 

Why work-to-rule? Why now? During the spring semester of 2020, UMass administration rejected proposals put forth by GEO during impact bargaining over COVID-19 to guarantee job security, summer funding, and protect international students during the pandemic. They refused the automatic payout for lost vacation time that’s required by the existing GEO contract. We now have to go to a costly arbitration hearing over the contract violation, which also costs staff and members time. Over 500 grad workers participated in a vacation action. This sent a strong message, but it ultimately didn’t put enough pressure on the University. If we want to win, we need to escalate. 
Our current proposals, which ensure health and safety of Res Life grad workers and RAPMU members and fight for racial justice by reducing dangerous police presence on campus, have gone unresponded. 
Yesterday, despite impassioned pleas from Anneta Argyres, President of the Professional Staff Union, and Eve Weinbaum, president of the Massachusetts Society of Professors,  the Board of Trustees voted to cut $170,000,000 out of the UMass system budget. We are fighting an uphill battle over UMass’s reopening plan and our next contract. 
We have two choices. We can take actions that force the board of trustees to abandon their austerity program and protect our jobs and lives; or we can give up and accept whatever they offer us. This fight will not be won at the bargaining table. We will not make management see the light with a perfect argument. Either we fight back now with work-to-rule, or we give up the ground we gained in our last contract. 

What are the “rules” in our contract and for my position? 
ARTICLE 2 of our contract (www.geouaw.org/geo-contract/) covers position responsibilities. The administration has fought hard to include a line suggesting that any additional responsibilities can be added on to each of these roles, with language like “including but not limited to”. This is intended to make actions like the one we’re doing now less effective. But your supervisor still needs to specifically direct you in advance. If you have any questions about this document, feel free to contact your department Steward, or to contact GEO staff at geo@umass.edu.

ARTICLE 20 of the contract requires your supervisor to provide a job description. This must be “developed by the department head”, and needs to include “a summary of the duties and responsibilities” and “a list of any required meetings and training programs”. The contract requires this to be sent with the GFAF; don’t try to do a job you don’t have a description for, even after the appointment’s start (Aug 21) make sure you have a job description before proceeding.
The job description you have might be vague but the article also requires that, “if appropriate, [grad employees shall] receive a more detailed description of the duties and responsibilities of the position”. “Appropriate” is not just up to your supervisor, insist that you have enough information to do your job and on Aug 21, as your supervisor for such a detailed description if you don’t have one.

ARTICLE 21 recognizes that grad workers have “reasonable latitude to exercise their professional judgment…in deciding how best to accomplish their assignments” provided that it’s “within the scope of the directions given by the individual’s supervisor as well as fiscal and time constraints”. Typically, the administration expects us to interpret fiscal and time constraints to their benefit. They keep our budgets and pay low, and don’t provide enough GEO eligible positions to avoid time constraints. Right now, they’re planning on making it even worse with reductions to ARD positions and the coming 170M cut. We have a professional responsibility to provide a good education, and that means taking the time we actually need in accordance with our professional judgement. 

What’s outside the scope of our contract and unpaid work? The expectation to be “professionals-in-training” can often erase our identities as workers/employees at UMass and can reinforce this exploitative idea that we should always going above and beyond to prove ourselves, to do extra unpaid work and training to prove we are qualified, and can feed on the same kinds of narratives that are weaponized against all educators: that it degrades the nobility of the profession to expect fair pay and benefits. 
Here’s a non exhaustive list of examples of unpaid labor:

If you ever have any questions about the work you’re doing, you can contact your department Steward. Don’t know who your Steward is? Find out on the GEO website.

My supervisor has asked me to do unpaid work. How do I respond to them The GEO Work-To-Rule Committee has devised an email template that you may use to respond to your supervisor, available here. As it’s before the start of Fall appointments, you can set it as an auto respond message and enjoy your summer. 

I don’t want to jeopardize my good relationship with my advisor or supervisor. How can I participate? By participating in this action we set our boundaries and provide our advisors with an opportunity to support us. Most of our supervisors want to be good mentors and will understand this. By getting as many people as possible on board with this action, our supervisors will have little ability to retaliate against us. We all have each others’ backs. If your supervisor objects to work-to-rule, or wants you to stop working to rule for any reason, you should point them to your department steward, who with support from the Work to Rule Committee and GEO reps, can set your supervisor straight. If they are insistent about speaking only to you about something, that means it’s doubly important to bring in your steward or the GEO grievance coordinator (anna@geouaw.org) into the conversation. 

How can I avoid overwork and protect myself? The best way to determine how much unpaid labor you’re doing is to log your hours. GEO staff has created a handy tool for doing this, available here. You can also keep track of your hours on your own. The point is just to keep a record of all the work that you do and stop when you hit your allotted hours

Note: You should never share your logged hours with your boss, supervisor, chair, or GPD—ever. 

The work I do for my dissertation and my contract work are hard to distinguish sometimes. How can I participate in work-to-rule?  Yes, you can still work to rule. You can designate which work goes toward contracted work and which work will benefit your academic progress and dissertation work and make that distinction clear if questioned by your supervisor. 
If you are consistently doing large amounts of unpaid labor, and you are unable to stop working past the limits set by our contract with the University, or you are being compelled to work beyond the limits of your contract by a supervisor, contact the GEO Grievance Coordinator, Anna Klebanowska, at anna@geouaw.org. 

I don’t want my students to be negatively impacted by Work-to-Rule and worry about how they will react if I scale back my unpaid labor. What should I do? As teachers in Chicago and West Virginia say, our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions. Work-to-rule is to benefit both graduate workers and undergraduate students. Undergrads are paying full price for a Zoom education to begin with; and if the administration gets its way, it will implement massive budget cuts that further impede that education, while still leaving undergraduates in debt. And the undergraduates know all this! Thus a good place to start would be talking to students about work-to-rule: what it is, why you’re doing it, and why it matters. 
Work-to-Rule is an above-ground action; we can bring undergrads into this effort by educating them on why it’s important for all of us to preserve funding. With undergrads and their parents joining in to put pressure on the administration we can win. Even if some of our students are frustrated or don’t understand, their frustration will motivate the administration and a fair contract and adequate staffing will benefit them. 

I’m an RA, how would I work to rule? As an RA, you are only obligated to do work towards a funded project for the amount of hours in your contract. You can work to rule by drawing a line with your supervisor or PI to only complete work for the amount of contracted hours each week. 

I’ve been doing this for a long time so I’m pretty sure I could whip together a class or discussion section on the first day of the appointment…How much unpaid labor went into building that skill? Exercise your professional judgement (see ARTICLE 21) to make sure you’re prepping the class right, not just being able to replicate what you were able to do at the start of your professional journey.

What if not enough people participate in the action? It’s true that if not enough people participate we will fail. But that’s also true if we allow our fears to stop us from acting at all. By calling everyone in our department, by having conversations about why this is important and posting on social media too, we can increase our chance of success.
We don’t need everyone to sign on on the first day: we can spread the action with every day. As we are brave and achieve results we can spread that resolve to other grad workers.

Is this to win at impact bargaining or in our contract? How will this be different than the vacation action?  It’s both. If we grow this action fast and have a dramatic effect, we will have more leverage to win at impact bargaining. But we’ll also have the time to build this up to help us win the next contract. The vacation action proved that we can organize lots of people fast and that we don’t need to be afraid. But because it was on a short time frame, it had a limited effect on university operations. This action is sustainable and protected.

Does this action go far enough? Will it really impact the administration? We are in charge of how far this action goes. Let’s work together to ensure that we’re having an impact. Our goal is to escalate as needed.