The Graduate Employees’ Organization, a union for University graduate student workers, marched toward Ikenberry Dining Hall from the South Quad last Thursday in protest of changes made in the graduate students’ healthcare plan. The University implemented the changes last fall without informing GEO, with deductible costs doubling from $150 to $300, out-of-pocket maximums increasing from $1,800 to $3,000 and prescription drug copays increasing across multiple tiers.
Graduate students were left to discover the sudden jumps in their medical costs on their own. They found that their monthly budgets towards obligations like prescription drugs were unable to meet their price tags without warning or explanation.
GEO mobilized to support students like Clara Belitz, GEO stewardess and graduate student studying information sciences, who suffered a miscarriage in January and struggled with significantly higher healthcare expenses from her procedure than expected due to these changes.
“When I talked about (my miscarriage) in a previous bargaining session, the administration explicitly told me that the problem was that I hadn’t gone to McKinley,” Belitz said. However, McKinley does not provide emergency room procedures, which Belitz needed for her miscarriage.
“That was really offensive; the increased cost of that visit was due to our health care plan changing, not due to me making poor medical choices … any of us can be hit with medical emergencies at any time,” Belitz said.
Get The Daily Illini in your inbox!
The march to Ikenberry Dining Hall culminated in the fourth bargaining session between GEO and the University.
University administrators were over 20 minutes late to the meeting, brought no counter-proposal of their own and “refused to budge” towards an agreement despite the union’s offers of “no-cost, low bar proposals” according to GEO Communications Chair and graduate student studying history Dale Mize.
Patrick Wade, director of executive communications and issues management for the University, said that the current insurance plan is both affordable and consistent with the collective bargaining contract terms between the University and GEO.
For GEO member Sam Froiland, graduate student studying history, the “affordable” healthcare plan sent him reeling financially after an unexpected bout of illness.
“Over spring break, I got sick,” Froiland said. “As the days went on, and I did not get better, I was faced a choice. Go to the doctor and spend over 20% of my monthly income, or wait it out and see what happens. Looking at my bills and groceries, I decided to risk it.”
Froiland said his decision backfired. By waiting, his illness worsened, and his recovery took twice as long. He attributes this predicament to out-of-touch University leadership disconnected from the realities faced by graduate workers.
“Chancellor Jones, Provost Coleman and their underlings that they send in the bargaining sessions, who come to us in bad faith, would tell us that it’s our problem,” Froiland said. “It’s our fault that we get sick. You know when you’re bleeding out, maybe take a second to look up your options before rushing to the emergency room, right? No, Provost Coleman, it is not the fault of the worker that the system you have instituted is corrupt, unjust and puts the financial health of the Endowment fund over the health and well-being of workers that make the fund possible.”
Indeed, a point that GEO has harped on is that graduate students perform essential duties for the University. GEO member Bram Osterhout, graduate student studying plant biology, explained that graduate students perform work in laboratories, mentor undergraduate students and volunteer in scientific outreach activities.
“Every time we publish the results of our scientific labor, we bring the University prestige and thus increase its ability to attract more donors and undergraduate students — who our friend Robb Craddock refers to as the University’s clients,” Osterhout said. “We are at best, paid a meager stipend for ostensibly 20 hours of work per week as a graduate research assistant, although we all work far more than that.”
With tensions still high and little progress made, a fifth bargaining session is expected to take place in the coming weeks.
“(The University) conceded that they would be willing to return with a counter-proposal with more concrete language around prompt notifications of plan changes,” Mize said. “Another bargaining session on this matter will therefore be announced shortly.”
Until then, the 3,000+ strong GEO, with over 200 of its members taking care of dependents, will continue to “make good trouble” on campus.
“This is why we organize, to make them recognize that these things are a problem,” Belitz said. “This fight for healthcare comes at a moment in which the entire country is very much reckoning with what healthcare should look like.”
