The Graduate Employees’ Organization secured another five years of guaranteed tuition waivers in its tentative agreement with the University, according to the document, obtained by The Daily Illini.

The bargaining units reached a tentative agreement Nov. 27, which the GEO brought back to its general membership that evening.

The next step for the GEO will be to initiate a contract ratification vote, which will begin during a general membership meeting Tuesday. The vote will continue until Thursday at several campus polling stations. GEO spokeswoman Stephanie Seawell said the results of the vote will be announced late Friday.

The guarantee of the tuition waivers marks a victory for the GEO, which was on the edge of striking until the agreement was set last week. In the tentative agreement, tuition waivers appear as they did in 2009: in a side letter as opposed to in the contract.

“The tuition waiver issue was the No. 1 issue for us, so without the kind of assurances that we felt we needed to protect tuition waivers, we wouldn’t have been able to sign a tentative agreement,” said Natalie Uhl, a member of the GEO’s bargaining team and graduate student.

Campus spokeswoman Robin Kaler said the University declined to comment until the GEO had voted to ratify the agreement.

According to the tentative agreement, in the first year of the contract, assistants will be paid no less than $15,190 per year for a standard, 50 percent appointment on a nine-month service basis, which is a 2.5 percent increase in wages from the contract that expired in August. Assistants must be employed by the time the agreement is made effective to receive this minimum wage.

From 2013 and on, assistants will see 2.5, 1.5, 1.5 and 1.5 percent increases respectively each year for a final wage of $16,281 per year in 2017, when the contract expires.

“We did get increases to the minimum, just not increases that bring us up to the living wage published by the University,” Uhl said.

The University estimated annual graduate student expenses to be $16,618 for the 2011-12 school year.

“Negotiating means that you can’t have everything that you want,” Uhl said. “There were some areas where we were hoping to make more movement, but in this case, we knew what the No. 1 issue was, so we were happy to have language protecting that, but there were other things we would have liked to have in there.”

The University agreed to cover 80 percent of the Student Health Insurance fee, which moved up from the 75 percent provided in the expired contract. The health insurance plan provided to graduate employees lets them purchase coverage for dependents, including children, but Uhl said GEO members would have also liked to see University coverage of dependent premiums.

Outside of the contract, the University also conceded to retroactively pay graduate employees in the College of Fine and Applied Arts, whose waivers had previously been reduced. This comes after a state arbitration board ruled that departments in the college violated the terms of a side letter to the 2009 contract that assured that would not happen. The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board ruled that the University’s actions constituted a “clear violation” of their contract.

The agreement includes a settlement in which the total amount of improperly charged tuition will be reimbursed with 7 percent interest. In exchange, the GEO agreed to withdraw all complaints pursuant to the prior side letter, and the University promised not to appeal the state board’s decision.

“While I would have preferred that the University not break our contract in the first place, having people made whole now rather than continuing that fight in the court system is definitely preferable from our perspective,” Uhl said.

Tyler can be reached at [email protected].