Strike Warning #15

Strike Warning #15
November 2, 2011

Number of days without a contract: 490
Last bargaining session with the SIUC administration: November 1, 2011
Next bargaining session with the SIUC administration November 2, 2011

Fellow graduate assistants,

Please join us if you can TONIGHT at our strike headquarters (map: http://wp.me/p1vXJd-en) at 6:30pm for an emergency meeting. We will give you the most up-to-date information on bargaining and this will be one of your last chances to make your voices heard about the current offer from the administration on the table.

There will also be a mass meeting tonight at the strike headquarters at 8pm for members of all four unions. While we all hope the news there will be “tentative agreements reached for all for unions!” this will be a last chance to get informed about strike plans and organization, in case the news isn’t so good.

If you are unable to attend either meeting, keep watch on our website for updates and information tonight. This will be the best place to get informed of what is going on. We have had people email us with problems with our listserv since Monday, including being removed from the listserv without requesting removal.

We continue to meet with the administration daily to find a fair solutions for high fees that degrade the value of our stipends and expand our options on health care. Those are the those are the issues most important to GAs on campus and those are the issues most important to your bargaining team.

We also want to explain the “fair share” clause you may have heard about in the Daily Egyptian yesterday. We understand this is a contentious issue for many GAs. Our union dues, should people choose to join, are only a low $20/month — and much lower than other GA unions in the state (the University of Illinois system has fair share and their members pay $40/month in dues).

We use our dues to do a lot of things. Money that stays with us locally pays for things like room rental on campus, copying, supplies, food and drinks for meetings, and a lot of smaller things like that. The majority of the dues goes to the IEA and the NEA, our Illinois and national affiliates, and returns to us in the form of services like legal fees/lawyers, leadership training on things like bargaining, handling grievances, organizing, and other union activities, the work of our UniServ director Jim Clark who provides advice, help, connections to resources with the larger organization we need, and even through discounts and member benefits (http://bit.ly/tJZ8b6).

Fair share is NOT forcing people to join the union. A fair share clause in the contract is asking everyone represented by GAU, who receives the benefits of GAU, to contribute. There are provisions for conscientious objectors and we do have a process through the IEA to handle that. We aren’t forcing anyone to join through this. We were open about having this clause on the table from the beginning because we believe fair share will help ensure the long-term health and stability of GAU on campus.

GAU leadership would NOT ask you to go on strike for fair share. This is still about fees and health care for us but tactically the smartest move is to keep as much as we can on the table — including fair share — as we negotiate the economics. Doing this may help us achieve a fair agreement we can live with.

Communications will be more frequent as we countdown the days until the strike deadline. You can stay informed by reading our webpage (http://gaunited.org), joining our Facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6789631853&ref=ts), following our brand new Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/#!/SIUCGAUnited), or subscribing to the blog for all four IEA-NEA unions on campus (http://siucunions.wordpress.com).

In solidarity,
Kristi Brownfield
Vice-President for Communications