They were first certified as the official union representing GSIs, GSSAs, and Graduate Student Research Assistants (GSRAs) at U-M on April 15, 1974, and they won their first contract the next year.
[2] GEO 3550's "mission is to represent, advocate for, and organize graduate student workers and to build collective power in the pursuit of social & economic justice.
"[3] In 2019, the union's Steward's Council adopted the following nine guiding principals: Represent, Advocate For, Organize, Collective Bargaining, Democracy, Social Justice, Solidarity, Community, Education & Research.
The union's constitutional officers include a President, a vice-president, a Secretary, and a Treasurer, all of whom are elected every year by a majority vote at a general membership meeting.
[7][8] This first effort was struck down, however, when MERC issued a decision agreeing with university administrators that, if teaching fellows were to be considered employees, they would have to be part of a unit alongside GSSAs and GSRAs.
[9] The response by graduate students was the formation of the Organization of Teaching Fellows (OTF), who casually affiliated themselves with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
After a pay increase averted a potential strike, teaching fellows continued to organize and joined the university's GSRAs and GSSAs to form GEO and officially request a MERC election for the second time in their history.
The agreement, finalized through mediation with the MERC-appointed fact finder Patrick McDonald, included compromises on several GEO demands: Effects of the 1975 strike reverberated out into the wider Ann Arbor community, even influencing local legislation proposals.
GEO claimed that this violated both the agreement in their contract that required a breakdown of racial demographics into "Black, Asian, Native American, Chicano and other Spanish Surnamed" as well as then-president Robben Wright Fleming's directive in the university's 1973 affirmative action report to the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
[20] The university had attempted to enter evidence into consideration that graduate assistants were students, not employees, during the original unfair labor practice trial, but the MERC administrative judge handling the case, Shlomo Sperka, would not admit the evidence because of his belief that the student-employee question had been decided by the 1973 Michigan Supreme Court decision that ruled that interns and residents at the U-M hospital were simultaneously both and therefore eligible to organize a labor union.
[22] In January 1978, MERC stated that it could not consider U-M's appeal of the unfair labor practice decision until evidence was heard regarding the student-employee question and ordered Judge Sperka to begin hearing testimony on the issue.
During the trial, which began in May 1978 and would not conclude until November 1981, both the union and the university called witnesses and submitted evidence to support their positions with the former arguing that graduate assistants were employees and the latter that they were students.
Fleming's testimony against considering graduate assistants to be employees focused on his claim that he received frequent complaints about the university's decision to rely so heavily on the use of GSIs instead of professors.
[28][29] In early November 1981, MERC reaffirmed the earlier decision that GSIs and GSSAs were employees but GSRAs were not, and it also ordered the university to abide by the contract that had been arrived at in 1976 before the legal disputes began.
[31][32] As GEO went back to the bargaining table with the university for the first time following its lengthy legal battle, the union was plagued by low membership and internal divisions that at least partly resulted from the half-decade of operating with no contract for graduate assistants.
[44][45] It wasn't until the fall of 1983 that the new bargaining team reached an agreement with the university and the membership narrowly voted to approve the one-year contract, which included a 5.1% raise, a tuition reduction of about 7%, and an encouragement but not a requirement for departments to establish class size caps.
[46][47] Although the union had settled its new contract, GEO soon ran into new problems when Congress allowed the bill that made tuition waivers tax exempt to expire in December 1983.
[51][52] The situation was finally resolved after US President Ronald Reagan signed the tax exemption of tuition waivers back into law on October 31.
In the fall semester of the 1983–1984 school year, only 637 of the 1,700 GSIs and GSSAs at U-M were union members, and less than two-thirds of non-members were paying the agency fees required by the closed shop clause.
[54] Petitioners argued that open shop policies were common at many businesses, that there not really any benefits to having a union because it was in the university's interest to offer competitive funding packages to attract students, and even that the MERC decision labelling GSIs and GSSAs "employees" was incorrect because their positions were part of their training and financial aid.
GEO also emphasized the importance of dues and agency fees in maintaining their affiliation with the Michigan and American Federations of Teachers in order to have access to resources like the lawyer who represented the union during their legal battle with the university.
[58] On September 3, 2020, following several months of advocating for a series of demands related to the COVID-19 pandemic and campus police, GEO 3550 issued strike authorization ballot to its members.