Editor’s Note: This article was published in the Spring 2010 Year in Review issue.

Graduate Employees’ Organizations at the University’s Urbana-Champaign and Chicago campuses experienced a strained relationship with administrators this year while negotiating contracts.

The University’s GEO went on strike for two days in November 2009, causing classes to be cancelled and forcing students to choose whether to cross picket lines.

“A strike could certainly affect the posting of grades, and I think that would clearly have potential for short term disruption for undergraduate students,” said GEO Communications Officer Peter Campbell last semester regarding the possibility of a strike.

The GEO and the University were eventually able to agree on a contract that guaranteed tuition waivers would not be reduced for graduate and teaching assistants who have qualifying assistantships, make progress toward graduation in the program they started in and are in good academic standing, said Robin Kaler, University spokeswoman, in a press release.

Campbell said the strike was the result of months of negotiations between the University and the GEO, beginning in late April 2009.

“Part of the reason why negotiations took so long was because the proposal the GEO brought to us in April was still pretty general,” Kaler said in an earlier interview. “For example, on each point we would have to say ‘what do you mean by this’ and it would take some time for the GEO bargaining team to clarify what they meant by each of the points that they wanted to have in the contract.”

This April, the Chicago campus’ GEO, called UIC GEO, decided against striking over graduate and teaching assistant tuition waivers in its contract. The UIC GEO had been bargaining on behalf of almost 1,500 graduate and teaching assistants for almost a year, according to a press release from the GEO. The contract expired in August 2009, but UIC negotiators had not talked about economic issues until a mediation session March 26. The two core issues agreed upon included the guarantee of tuition waivers for the UIC GEO, and letting the UIC GEO have a say in tuition differential fees.

Other agreements settled upon included more economic security provided by the UIC administration, such as a health care cost of $250 per GEO member per year, up from $100. The two sides also agreed upon a 2 percent stipend increase per year for the next two years.

UIC GEO Communications Officer Gina Gemmel said the group’s primary concerns were tuition waivers and tuition differentials.

“We really did not want to strike just for higher pay, since we understand that the current economic situation is not great,” Gemmel said after the negotiations were finished. “We’re really happy that we got what we did.”