Graduate employees will now be informed when students in their classes contract COVID-19, according to an announcement from UO executive vice provost Janet Woodruff-Borden from Oct. 27. The decision follows the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation’s “grassroots organizing” — as Cy Abbott, GTFF vice president for grievances, calls it — in the form of Occupational Safety and Health Administration complaints, and GTFF is hopeful it can carry the momentum into future negotiations with the university.
GTFF wants to continue with this momentum and work as a union toward larger and longer-term goals like extended funding, Abbott said.
“Often, when we do a formal grievance process, it could take months. It’s like a long drawn out process of arbitration,” he said. “As a union, we decided, ‘hey, we tried to do it over this avenue, but what gives us power is organizing.”
Rajeev Ravisankar, former GTFF president and current member, remembers organizing at the end of the last bargaining period in October 2019. Ravishankar said over 1,000 graduate employees were prepared to go on strike over health care and wages. UO and GTFF were able to reach an agreement before Nov. 4, 2019, the planned strike date.
The use of informal demands are heightened right now because UO and GTFF agreed to push the formal bargaining process a year. The current collective bargaining agreement is effective until June 15, 2023 instead of its original expiration date in 2022.
This time of year, the union would normally be gearing up for the bargaining cycle, seeking support and prioritizing bargaining items, Abbott said. But now it must maintain momentum until next year and work toward priorities in other ways.
One of Abbot’s areas of focus is funding extensions for GEs whose work has been postponed by COVID-19. Earlier this year, UO and GTFF reached an agreement to extend funding for PhD students in their final year of study and allow COVID-19 related absences to qualify for assistance, but the agreement was not complete, Ravinsankar said.
“About 115 GEs benefited from it, but many others couldn’t because they didn’t meet the narrow criteria that were set,” he said. “And we indicated that there’s a much greater need.”
Ravisankar said COVID-19 made it much more difficult to continue working at a pre-pandemic level due to mental health toll, lack of access to campus resources and safety concerns.
“I used to always work in the library and had to shift, but I had nothing setup at home,” he said. “I didn’t even have a proper internet connection … Trying to manage to work at home when you have these issues hanging over your head — you’re living through a pandemic and you’re trying to take care of yourself and the people around you — I think those things are hard to grasp entirely.”
Ravisankar said funding extensions should acknowledge these struggles and apply to more students, including masters students.
COVID-19 concerns beyond being alerted of positive cases in classes remain prominent, as well. Ravisankar said UO never issued personal protective equipment to the promised degree. Disposable surgical masks are readily available to GEs, but N95s are not, he said.
He also noticed that students feel pressured to attend class even when sick, something he thinks should be further addressed at a university-wide level.
And there are the ongoing issues of low wages and overwork, Abbott said.
“[GEs] love working with undergrads. We love that energy, but it’s that kind of cooperation,” he said. “A lot of GEs overwork because they want what’s best for their students.”
Ravisankar said GEs should be included in a more democratized university model and contribute to decisions rather than reacting to them, especially because many undergraduate students feel comfortable expressing concerns to them.
Achieving any of these goals starts with the “grassroots organizing” GTFF saw recently, particularly through giving GEs a forum to share their experiences and unite behind common struggles, Abbott said.
“We could use a lot of support from undergrads with keeping that focus, because next year it’s going to be a fight, and we can’t lose this energy,” Abbot said.
