Author: geoumassboston

Mark your calendars! As the Fall 2023 semester approaches, you can get ready to apply for the Scholarly Support Fund. Applications for the Fall 2023 round of SSF will open on Tuesday, September 12, at 8 am EST. Remember SSF is a first come-first serve grant; funding is awarded to applicants in the order GEO receives applications. Check out the official SSF guidelines by clicking “Scholarly Support Fund” (top right).

We’re happy to invite you to three events that we are holding with the GSA!

The Hypocrisy & Humor of the Student Loan Debt Crisis (Education in Equity Series: On Wednesday evening, from 6:00pm-7:30pm, we’re holding the first in our Education in Equity series: join the important conversation with Dr. Venus Evans-Winters and our own Dr. Keith Jones, moderated by GEO’s Chidimma Ozor Commer! Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_m1TjmfGdTPC0Ghp82JAVMg

Dunkin’, Donuts, and Debt Relief: On Thursday, December 1, from 11:30am to 1:30pm, join a Student Loan Relief Q&A. Join us with the GSA on Campus Center 03-3115 to ask some questions, see if we’ve any answers, and swing by for snacks, warm drinks, and information. 

GEO-GSA Semester End Party: The final event: join us on Friday evening, from 6:00pm onward, at The Harp and Bard (located at 1099 Dorchester Ave, which is practically right next to the Savin Hill T Stop) for the semester-end party! Food, drinks, comrades, and conversation. We always throw a good event at the Harp: don’t miss out.

Voting for the Fall 2022 elections to fill the sixth – and new – position in the GEO organizing committee will be held online on Tuesday, October 11 (opens at 8 am EST) and Wednesday, October 12 (closes at 11:59 pm EST).

Only pre-registered, dues-paying GEO members are eligible to vote in this election. Everyone should register for voting by Friday, October 7 at 11:59 pm EST. To register, fill out a new dues-authorization PDF and email it to geoumb.elections@gmail.com from your UMB email account. *If you are a new graduate student or have decided to join your graduate union and vote, you can vote as long as you register on or before October 7 at 11:59 pm EST.

Look at the fantastic graduate students running for this position (here)!

For more details, you can access the Fall 2022 Elections Guide here or by clicking the top right page on this website.

Applications for the Scholarly Support Fund (SSF) will be opening soon after the start of the Fall semester [September 12 at 8 am EST]. If you attended a Summer conference or plan to attend one in the Fall, you can start getting ready to apply for funding. You can also apply for non-conference-related expenses. Please see SSF guidelines here! Please reach out to geo@umb.edu if you have any questions.

The GEO

Let’s talk about power and organizing. We can often spend a lot of time getting lost in a rush of actions and updates that happen while we’re here at UMass – while we’re dealing with the university time and time again and the updates can often feel depressing at times, because it’s an endless treadmill and a constant fight – well. We have to see what it is we are fighting for. We have to see what victory looks like.

And fortunately for us, we’ve got a few examples of that. 

Howard University faculty threatened a strike two weeks ago over low pay and bad conditions – and after threatening the strike, the university gave in. Howard’s faculty were given a raise to bring their non-tenure-track faculty up to pay parity with tenure-track faculty, as well as one that would guarantee longer term appointments so that faculty would not be working semester to semester.

Sound familiar? It’s the same way we’re appointed – or “non-reappointed” – every semester. It’s a way we’re fighting the university to ensure that graduate students get job security. And we can see that it’s something that we *can fight* and a fight that we can win – as long as we all fight. But what we have to offer about Howard’s situation is second-hand at best, and it’s best that you hear directly from people who were on the ground and fighting the good fight, one that’s been in the making for over a year now. 

It’s not just Howard’s non tenure-track faculty pushing on its employer. Across the country, Starbucks have been unionizing in a wave of ratification votes to push for better wages and rights – and Starbucks is terrified. We know Starbucks is scared because of how it is they’re responding. Rather than let the employers unionize and back off, or work in some way to increase benefits, the company is trying to fire employees for their union organizing – while claiming that it’s for violations. In the meantime, those employees are seeking to fight back against their retaliation… and while Starbucks resorts to failed terminations, the best they have to show for it is their anti-union website. Their anti-union website is hilariously bad. We won’t link it here, but it’s good for a laugh and a reminder that the people fighting us often rely – heavily – on money and institutional moment.

While Howard faculty are winning by threatening strike actions, and Starbucks are unionizing across the country, there’s another larger labor win – and it’s JFK8, one of the Amazon warehouses in Staten Island, which voted to unionize the other day. Amazon is pushing back in every way that they can, but the ALU is already beginning to move toward unionizing other warehouses in the area. This win is one that we should view as empowering and one that we can take strength from. An employee fired by the company for unionizing efforts leads an election and unionizes the first Amazon warehouse – and if Amazon employees can do that, then we can fight, too. [See ALU’s website here: https://www.amazonlaborunion.org/]

When we fight together, we win together.

Let’s fight together.

This Thursday, we’re holding our next action on campus. Join us at the union office between 945am and 1015am – and then join us as we march up to Quinn-03 to present our open letter to the Chancellor. If you haven’t yet, you can read the letter here – it’s arguing that we need more and better from the university. 

Sign the letter – and spread the word. Everyone and anyone can sign onto the letter, and the more, the better, so share this URL widely! https://forms.gle/mV9S3eiHmt987zKUA When we fight together, we win together, and we have to fight together to get that win.

Join us Thursday.

Let’s push back.

You may know about the GSA – the Graduate Student Government – and what they’re up to, and you may have applied to SSF earlier this semester. We’ve got good news.

First thing’s first: the GSA is announcing the opening of both the Dr. Robert. W Spayne and Craig R. Bollinger spring 2022 research grants! 

The Spayne Research Grant (which is for work leading to a master’s thesis or a capstone project) is a competitive grant awarded to assist students in defraying research expenses. The numbers vary, and it can reward up to $1500 each Fall and Spring semester! The grant is to support registered masters students and not en route doctoral students. 

The Bollinger Doctoral Thesis Grant is for work leading to a doctoral dissertation or doctoral-level capstone project – similar to the Spayne grant, it is meant to defray the costs of research, and while the number of grants vary, it can reward up to $1500 each Fall and Spring semester. Candidates who have already defended their proposals and received IRB approval are welcome to apply!
To apply for either grant, https://umb.campuslabs.com/engage/ using your email (not @umb.edu; just your email) and your email password. Once logged in, click on “Organizations” and search for Graduate Student Assembly. From the GSA home page, click the join button, then on forms, and then select the Spayne or Bollinger application form as applicable. More detailed instructions can be found there.

Please help us get a better Dorchester Bay City Proposal by signing and sharing this petition to Mayor Wu and the Boston Planning and Development Authority to Slow Down Approval.

The current proposal for “Dorchester Bay City” is far too big, far too brash, and needs to be slowed down!  We hope the new Mayor will recognize this need – but we need to urge her to do so.

Please support important changes to Dorchester Bay City (DBC) development and the timeline for approving it. You have heard several times this year from our Administration about Accordia Partners’ plan to build Dorchester Bay City—a project as large as three Empire State Buildings–on waterfront land leased from UMass Boston at the former Bayside Expo Center, with some adjoining land. The UMB Administration has actively supported this project, which will generate up to $235 million in future revenue for the campus, as it has moved through the City’s development review process.  

At the same time, many UMB staff, faculty and students strongly oppose the DBC project’s process to date and its current form. We believe that our campus has a moral responsibility as the largest “anchor institution” in the community and the major financial beneficiary of this development to push the developers to do better (at the very least, a scaled down version with decent affordable housing). Many members of the broader Dorchester community also oppose the current plan because of the significant economic and climate risks it will bring for the community and the fact that to date many of the most at-risk members of the community have not been sufficiently included in the process.

Make Your Voice Heard! What You Can Do to Help Us Get a Better DBC Proposal 

We encourage you to sign the petition linked below that was created by our community partner coalition, DotNot4Sale. It calls on Mayor Michelle Wu and the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) to institute a six month slow-down of the project approval process, which will help us to get real community feedback, as well as more commitments around affordability, good jobs, and community benefits.

The petition link is https://bit.ly/DBCPetition

Please also share this petition with others who can help us reach the Mayor and the BPDA. We need this time to get real commitments from the developer and to make sure residents most impacted by displacement are at the table. Let’s win real affordability, actions against displacement, jobs access, climate resiliency, and racial justice!

We met with the university on February 1st: management is beginning to be less obstinate toward our demands for more information and more conversation. In the latest bargaining session, in which we had to break down to management in very basic terms why we needed to be discussing actual numbers with them for our proposals, they began to come around to the idea.

Shortly after the meeting, we received a request to share our fiscal proposals so they could “catch up”. Fiscal proposals we submitted March 2021.

The fight continues – and we need you to join us!

Our next bargaining session is Thursday, February 17th, at 930am. We are as of yet unsure if this meeting will be in-person, or over Zoom: management seems reluctant to meet in-person due to COVID, which makes us wonder why the university is still operating on campus. 

To that end, we have two asks for you today.

The first is to fill out this interest form for Bargaining on the 17th: https://forms.gle/EvQsURN7uixMFvwRA

The second is to fill out this general Health and Safety form – the university does not want to meet regularly, and we need to know what you want so we can push them. The more you speak, the more we can speak for you.  https://forms.gle/8jb5mMagatTFukfB7

Warren Hinckle
Solidarity,

One of these two candidates will fill one position in the GEO Organizing Committee this semester. Check them out and prepare for voting.

Register before it’s too late! The elections voting registration period ends on Friday, October 8 at 5 p.m. EST. Everyone needs to register prior to voting. To register, make sure to send a filled membership dues form from your UMB email to us at geoumb.elections@gmail.com. For more information on elections, click here.

Nominations and registration for elections are open! Your union (the Graduate Employee Organization) is holding elections to fill one half-time (0.5 FTE) assistantship position on the Organizing Committee with an official start-work date of Monday, October 18. Similar to Fall 2020 elections, all graduate employees interested in voting should register prior to voting. You will find more information below. 

The GEO Organizing Committee is composed of five Graduate Assistants at UMass Boston. We work collaboratively to advocate for graduate employee rights within the school and enrichment opportunities for graduate workers at UMass Boston. Some of the projects in which the Organizing Committee are currently working on include:

• Bargaining a new contract with UMB’s administration to address labor concerns affecting graduate employees
• Engaging with graduate employees and community members of UMass Boston to organize collective action and increase membership engagement
• Administering Scholarly Support Funds (SSF) for students seeking funding to present at or attend conferences
• Mediating member grievances 
• Attending and helping organize coalition efforts within the community
• Developing communications content for the website, social media, and e-newsletters.

Elections timeline:

• Wednesday, September 15: Nomination & Voting Registration period starts
• Sunday, September 26: Nomination period closes
• Monday, September 27: Campaign period starts
• Friday, October 8: Voting Registration ends
• Tuesday & Wednesday, October 12 and 13: Voting days
• Friday, October 15: Result Announcement

How do I nominate myself?

To nominate yourself, you must email your completed nomination form and evidence that you are an active dues-paying member (your most recent pay stub – accessed through HR Direct) or a Dues authorization Form to geoumb.elections@gmail.com on or before Sunday, September 26 at 5:00 p.m. EST. Please complete all sections of the nomination form.