After months of deliberation, the University and the Graduate Employee Organization are continuing negotiations over wages and benefits. On Oct. 16 they came to an agreement over professional evaluation for teaching assistants.

However, there has been little progress on the major issues of pay and other contentious matters, according to Christopher Simeone, lead negotiator of the GEO. He said that the GEO is awaiting the University’s agreement to additional bargaining dates.

Frank T. Higbie, assistant professor of history at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, said that he has been involved with the GEO since his days as a doctoral student in the mid-1990s.

He said that much of the consternation and unwillingness of the University to recognize the union came from an unclear clause in state law as to whether or not graduate employees can organize. The University’s reading was that students cannot organize as a union, while the union’s position was that employees have the right to unionize, Higbie said.

“There is a misconception that workers stay in one place,” Higbie said, in regard to the charge that graduate employees shouldn’t organize because they are only at the University for a fixed period of time.

He said that denying workers the right to organize due to working for a limited amount of time is illogical.

“People are working for shorter and shorter periods of time at a single workplace,” Higbie said. “I worked at my first job after graduating for five years before coming back to the University and worked here for 10 years as a graduate employee.”

He said the issue comes down to whether or not workers have a right to organize and that the question of a limited term of employment is a “red herring.”

“What are they afraid of?” asked Higbie. “That the grad assistants are going to tear down the University?”

Higbie said graduate employee unions are at nearly all of the University’s peer institutions.

The University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin have been “unionized for decades,” and the University of California has been unionized for nearly a decade, said Higbie.

“The GEO fought for and won improvements in pay, dental insurance, eye-care insurance and other things,” Higbie said. “The University gave us nothing. They resisted every step of the way, and apparently they are still resisting today.”

Cary Nelson, English professor and president of the American Association of University Professors, said that the union has provided a few areas of concern to the University, such as asking it to inform international graduate students of the American 911 system.

Nelson said that when the union asked the University to inform the international graduate students of the 911 system, the University declined on the grounds that “they would not have the union micromanage their affairs.”

“Like many corporate entities, the University is not bargaining in good faith,” said Nelson. “Their primary aims are to pay grad students as little as possible, to exhaust union leadership and to decrease students’ faith in the union…I call that bargaining in bad faith.”

Nelson said that the University should be interested in doing the best for their students and not “simply extracting their labor for the lowest possible cost.”

“We are working very hard to try to make progress, and we will continue to do that,” said Robin Kaler, University spokeswoman. “We are willing and ready to work with the union to try to create a contract.”

Graduate students enrich campus, said Kaler, and the University is happy to have them. She said that the University hopes that the experience of the graduate students’ is the best that it can be.

Other University officials contacted declined to comment.