What Can We Learn From the U-M GEO Strike?

by Craig Regester

Strikes are illuminating, even really short ones. With the September strikes by the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) and Resident Advisors (RA) at the University of Michigan now over, many in the U-M community, including those like myself who teach as lecturers, are reflecting on and drawing lessons from the strikes.

As of January 2019, the University of Michigan is the fifth largest employer in Michigan, with over 36,000 employees. Only the Big 3 auto companies and the state itself have more employees. So when nearly 80% of voting GEO (AFT-Michigan 3550) members authorized a strike the day before Labor Day, and then voted again only four days later to continue the strike after receiving an insulting offer from the administration, this was a pretty big deal.

Some background is necessary: GEO is one of the oldest unions of graduate student employees in the U.S. Since its founding in the early 1970s, GEO has gone on strike several times (check out this website for a detailed history). Unions formed by graduate students have been typically more politically radical than their parent organizations such as the American Federation of Teachers and UAW. Even within this context and GEO’s own history, however, the 2020 strike was unique:

• First, only a few months before the strike, in April, the union had ratified a new three-year contract after many contentious months of negotiations. So the strike was authorized by members outside of the traditional and very time-intensive and exhausting bargaining cycle that had just wrapped up. GEO was clearly mobilized and ready for a fight, but what explains this?
• Second, covid-19, of course! U-M’s largely closed-door covid-19 preparedness process during the summer of 2020 was the primary impetus for the GEO strike. In fact, the administration’s disingenuous impact bargaining throughout the summer (over the impacts of Covid-19 on working conditions) had really pissed off GEO members — and many in my own sister union, LEO (Lecturer Employees Organization/AFT Local 6244) — for wasting precious summer months that could have been spent otherwise organizing within our unions or planning for the fall semester. More broadly, the growing anxiety across U-M in response to the administration’s poor public health planning process positioned GEO’s covid-19 strike demands to become instantly very popular across multiple sectors of the Ann Arbor campus and in Michigan Medicine (U-M’s health system).
• At the same time, however, the covid-19 pandemic meant that the strike had to be strategically and tactically organized in a mostly virtual “Zoomlandia” world (one of the main strike activist-leaders, in fact, was in Europe the whole summer!). This was good in that it meant more GEO members could become engaged in preparing and planning for a potential strike once the semester began, but it was also a downside, constraining GEO and its allies’ ability to build and to demonstrate public pressure and support for the strike.
• Third, George Floyd’s murder on May 25 sparked a whole new level of national and global protests and street activism during the summer of 2020 in support of the growing Movement for Black Lives. This larger political context emboldened many GEO activists who were pushing for a strike to assert anti-policing demands (which had been attempted but ultimately negotiated away in the recently concluded contract bargaining). Many GEO activists were clearly inspired and energized by the larger social uprisings and the “Defund the Police” slogan and demands that overtook headlines.

What did the GEO strike accomplish?

When considered from the narrow view of their specific labor contract, the nine-day strike won some modest gains: more child-care funding, more staff resource support for international students, and more transparency in the University’s Covid-19 dashboard reporting.

When considered from the perspective of all campus labor, however, GEO and anyone who works for U-M won a whole lot more. Indeed, only two days after GEO authorized the strike more than 100 non-union undergraduate Resident Advisors organized an unprecedented labor strike mostly via Zoom. Less than a week after GEO went on strike, more than 200 U-M workers (union and non-union), students and community members participated in an unprecedented virtual speak-out (the speak-out by the All Campus Labor Council had been in development for weeks prior to the GEO strike, but GEO’s action boosted participation.) Finally, directly as a result of the GEO strike, there are renewed and highly energized efforts by non-union staff throughout U-M (10,000+ workers) to organize and to fight for union recognition. While these organizing efforts are still in their early stages, they are serious and robust.

When considered from a broader political perspective, GEO demonstrated with its strike that workers can organize together and build power to fight for social movement demands. While ultimately unsuccessful in forcing the U-M administration to meet any of its specific anti-policing demands, by daring to fight for broader social movement progress, GEO showed all of us that raising questions about policing and structural racism are absolutely relevant to our collective struggles over working conditions. GEO opened up desperately needed political space in the elite liberal bastion of Ann Arbor and stretched our imaginations for how we must think about organizing and fighting (and one day, winning!).

To close, there were other lessons from the summer of 2020 and the GEO strike that should bring both pause and enthusiasm to those who want a growing labor movement. Back in June, things looked pretty good for union supporters at U-M. Indeed, the UM Regents approved “card-check” recognition, which makes it much easier for U-M employees to organize new unions. Three months and two strikes later, what are the implications?

Does this mean other groups of U-M employees will follow the RAs’ lead and consider staging strikes to spark union organizing? Will a more labor-friendly administrative landscape emerge across U-M’s three campuses and in Michigan Medicine? Or maybe a more clear signal of what’s on the horizon was the Administration’s unprecedented strong-arm response to the GEO strike: filing a historically rare request for a court-ordered injunction. We will find out soon, as both my union and the U-M nurses will begin bargaining their next contracts in January 2021.

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