As the official union for Graduate Employees, we have a right to negotiate the impacts of policy decisions made between main bargaining periods. With so many policy changes resulting from responses to the COVID pandemic, we have been in near constant negotiations with University Administration since February.
We are currently meeting with management around impacts occurring during the fall semester. Some of the things we are discussing include greater support and protections for international students, clarity on the Massachusetts quarantine, ensuring health and safety protection for people who have to come to campus, monitoring class sizes and work-loads are not increasing for members working remotely, and attempting to make sure that graduate students are not penalized due to class changes.
We are awaiting management’s reply to informal proposals we mentioned during our last meeting; once we have something in writing (or are ready to propose our own language to management), we’ll come with another update.
Graduate Employee Organization 