The Graduate Employee Union (GEU) at the University of Connecticut sent out a survey to its members on their priorities for contract negotiations with UConn.
The GEU is made up of approximately 2,300 members, including most graduate assistants at UConn with some exceptions such as UConn Health graduate assistants, according to its current bargaining contract with UConn.
Their contract runs from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2026, and includes items such as wages and healthcare. GEU Vice President Alex Kueny, a graduate student majoring in history, said that the GEU is one union with two separate bargaining units. He stated that the aforementioned contract does not include postdoctoral students and that their bargaining rights are protected by a separate contract.
The GEU sent out a survey to all its members and is gathering responses until Sept. 12, according to Kueny. This survey will be used to determine priorities and items that union members want changed during contract negotiations. He stated that the survey has already had hundreds of responses.
Kueny spoke about the priorities mentioned by members who have already filled out the survey. The current contract included annual raises ranging from 3-4%.
“Our members have been telling us that they want — it’s called COLA in union slang — cost of living adjustment, and that’s one of the things that’s going to be really important,” Kueny said.
Healthcare was also very important to many GEU members.
“We have access to something called the Connecticut Partnership Plan, which is a healthcare plan for Connecticut state employees beyond just UConn,” Kueny said. “That’s really important to a lot of members, perhaps even more so than the cost of living adjustments.”
Kueny said that workforce protections were also highly prioritized.
“We have a grievance procedure we can make use of if someone’s facing anything like bullying or discrimination or harassment,” Kueny said. “We already have good protections there already, of course, everything’s going to be on the table so we want to work really hard to defend that in the negotiations.”
Kueny said that the GEU has an elected executive board and that during bargaining years andthey also have an elected bargaining team that will take part in the negotiations with UConn. He said that while they would need to make important decisions in the moment, the GEU wants priorities to be set by its members.
“Some people work in labs, some people are doing field work on the coast, some people are teaching,” Kueny said. “So, we want to get everyone’s experiences to give us a good sense of what’s important to them. And then we’ll use that to create a document about our bargaining goals, which will then be sent back out to the membership to vote to ratify.”
Once it is ratified, that will be the guiding document the bargaining team uses in meetings with UConn. Kueny said the GEU’s bargaining team and university administrators will have their first bargaining meeting on Sept. 17. He stated that contract negotiations would need to be finished by March at the latest, because once the GEU and UConn reach an agreement on the contract, both sides will work to try to pass the contract through the legislature.