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No Joke - by KT Chen

4/1/2019

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The Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) at my University is on strike.

The upshot is, these student workers get paid $18,000 a year, pay the University $2,000+ in fees each year, and do so in exchange for work (teaching or research).  Also, their contract ran out five months ago, and a new one hasn't been agreed upon; hence the strike.

What the GEO is asking for is a raise, fee waivers, and a fair contract.  

Somehow Bernie Sanders was told / found out about the strike, and tweeted a message of support on March 25 (2019 @ 9:02 AM).  I re-tweeted this and got into a short back-and-forth with a guy on the original thread.

I'm not sure if the guy was just trolling whatever Bernie supported, or if he really thinks it's okay for a University with billions of dollars in their budget to steamroll student workers.  Either way, I've thought a lot about it for the past six days and the best I can come up with is that the guy is a symptom of elitism in American society.  Rather than seeing students as people trying to improve their lives (and, through teaching, the lives of others), his argument was that they "knew what they were getting into" when they "signed up for it" and they should "get another job" or "get a different job" if they didn't like it.  (The second job part is not allowed, by the way).

The problem with that kind of thinking, as I see it, is that it ignores the need for workers to be able to hold their employers accountable for their working conditions.  -- Seems especially important, since the current government is trying to roll back all sorts of protections.

I support the GEO on their endeavor and I hope the University comes to it's senses soon.

Go forth and write!

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    I write about writing, working out, my dog, being deaf, and anything else I find of interest.

    I post on Mondays, before 9 AM.

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