Stewards' Corner #1
Introducing Your Chief Steward

July 27, 2025

My name is Joe (he/him), and I’m a fifth-year PhD student in the history department. Though I lost a squeaker of an election for chief steward in the spring, the winner—my comrade, Charlie—needed to step down due to capacity issues, and the steering committee appointed me (in an interim capacity for now) on July 2.

As a labor historian, I find inspiration in the international syndicalist tradition and the left-led CIO unions of the 1930s and 1940s. Approaching the chief steward role with those sensibilities, I view agitation for change on the shop floor as the best way to build a vibrant, democratic union. In practice, what that means for a union like ours is empowering members to struggle against the day-to-day encumbrances quietly faced by so many graduate workers— things like principal investigators’ abuses of power, workload creep, and arbitrary and capricious distinctions between salaried work and academic progress. Some people may object: “I have a good relationship with my supervisor—I’m mainly interested in higher wages!” I hear that, but in my time with the union, I have encountered multiple instances where these kinds of struggles activate people in our bargaining unit, spurring them to organize both within and outside their departments. At a moment when we’re bargaining a new contract, many newly active members are eager to plug in to the fight for our core contractual goals. Therefore, shop-floor issues complement, rather than preclude, our strategy to win, among other things, the wages we deserve.

While the fight for a better contract heats up, we must also be vigilant about defending the protections we already have in place. The university has demanded cuts to the number of assistantships in many academic units across both campuses—but especially in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences—with the pretext that they are compelled by the “uncertainties” of the moment and face a “structural deficit” in LAS (in reality, this is little more than creative accounting, given the administration’s sanguine reports to investors). These cuts were made without consulting the union, and GEO has made its position to the university clear: these actions constitute bargaining unit erosion and unilateral changes during bargaining, both unfair labor practices. We will pursue complaints “in the proper fora,” as the university brusquely suggested we do, but graduate workers are suffering the consequences of these cuts now, and so we must act now to defend our rights rather than waiting around for the university to follow labor law. Come to a mass meeting this Tuesday, July 29 at 5pm on Zoom to discuss next steps! RSVP here.