Spring 2024 GMM 1 Follow Up

February 7th, 2024

Thank you to everyone who attended our general membership meeting last week! It was inspiring to see how many members are passionate and engaged with the union. On the eve of contract bargaining, we’re feeling powerful.

At the GMM, we had a detailed discussion of the budget, grievances from the past semester, and the successes of our RA unionization campaign. Additionally (and importantly) we also discussed the timelines and logistics of contract bargaining, which we’ll begin in Spring 2025.  Finally, the membership discussed and passed a proposal submitted by members related to bargaining bottom lines. The text of the proposal that passed as well as the notes from the meeting are available to members upon request at geo@uicgeo.org.

There were two member proposals that we did not discuss in the meeting. Two provisions in one of these proposals related to steps the Steering Committee should take to improve transparency and foster participatory democracy. The Steering Committee (after discussing with the members who brought the proposals) has decided to directly implement these. First, we’ll be opening up the GEO Discord channel–heretofore the GEO Stewards Discord–to the general membership. If you’re interested in connecting with other GEO members via Discord, reach out to outreach@uicgeo.org for the invite link. Second, there was a proposal to open Steering Committee meetings to the membership and to post a Zoom link to these meetings publicly. You can now find the schedule of SC meetings and the Zoom link at our website. 

In order to create more space for members to discuss proposals with their fellow union members, we’ll be having another general membership meeting later this semester. We’re tentatively planning to have the meeting in mid-March, and we will give at least two weeks notice before the meeting. We’ll use the lessons we learned from this past GMM and will incorporate member feedback to facilitate a smoother, more efficient conversation.