Graduate Employees' Organization

The GEO first began organizing at UIUC in the mid-1990s, gaining its first contract with the Board of Trustees (BoT) of the University of Illinois system in 2004.

Some committees like the Work Action Group (WAG) and the Bargaining Research Team (BRT) are temporary, based on GEO's current organizational needs.

These communications include the website, social media, orientation materials, mass emails, press releases, t‐shirts, buttons, stickers, and much more.

To that end, the Solidarity Committee allows the creation of research groups to efficiently strategize around issues of social justice.

In the fall of 1993, a new group of graduate employees began building an active organization with the goal of matching the achievements of unions at the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin.

With the ID cards, assistants were able to retain many benefits such as staff parking, access to the Illini Credit Union, and state of Illinois employee discounts.

The GEO filed these cards as a petition with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (IELRB) to request a union election.

[6] In 1998, the Labor Board reviewed the petition and two of the three members in the committee ruled that graduate assistants would not be considered employees.

[7] At the end of March, 55 graduate employees and supporters (including clergy, union members, and student government leaders) held a 20-hour sit-in at the Board of Trustees office to draw public attention to the administration's policy of non-recognition.

They must now allow "those individuals whose assistantships are not significantly connected to their status as students ... the same statutory right to organize as other educational employees.

Provost Richard Herman, accompanied by Deputy University Legal Counsel Steve Veazie, agreed to a series of meetings with GEO representatives to decide on the composition of the bargaining unit.

[17] A few months after the new contract was signed, in the summer of 2010, the College of Fine and Applied Arts (FAA) reduced tuition waivers in five departments (Music, Dance, Theater, Landscape Architecture, and Urban & Regional Planning) from the out-of-state to the in-state rate, a difference of $13,000 per year.

The union grieved this violation of the contract with the university administration and filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) with the IELRB.