Will Geo Shut

The space between the big buildings at the University of Michigan was a little emptier than usual this week. the streams of people moving through class change a third or half their normal size.
The Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) has struck the University of Michigan, and is struggling day by day to shut it down. Seven hundred teaching assistants have been joined by perhaps as many active student supporters. Together they have thrown picket lines around 30 University buildings and are asking other University students and workers to stay out with them. 

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Effects on class attendance and University service were immediate. On the first day of the strike, Tuesday February 11 . the Haven-Angell-Mason complex, center of the literary college, was nearly empty as were other class buildings.
On the second day truck deliveries began to slow or turn back in appreciable numbers. By the third day the first faculty letter of support appeared in the Michigan Daily, more classes shut down, and, at 6:30 in the morning, two to three hundred pickets showed up to block University service trucks coming out of the Hoover-Green facility.
The greater part of the University machine continued to function, however. With that for assurance, negotiators for University President Robben Fleming refused to give much at the bargaining table.
So that pressure would build for the teaching assistants to come out of the cold, the University continued to stress negotiating progress and minimize the strike's effect. GEO claimed just the opposite. Bargaining "is down to the final ingredients," said Fleming on Tuesday, to which GEO spokesman David Gordan responded, "that's a crock of shit."
On Thursday GEO reported progress on only two non-money issues, out of eleven outstanding.
The heart of the GEO strike is an impossibly low wage structure, in fact the lowest in the Big Ten. Teaching assistants are demanding a 25% pay increase and a greatly reduced tuition rate, but the strike means more than a bread and butter concession from the University.
On the table are demands for a more open, democratic University. Besides economic points, the union was still committed to affirmative action in the hiring of woman and minority teaching assistants; a non-discrimination clause against gay persons; class size limits of 20/25; a greater role for teaching assistants in department decisions; and a union shop.
 The strike followed eight months of bitter negotiation, during which the University rejected binding arbitration and then declined to negotiate seriously as the strike deadline approached. Although GEO demands represent a claim on only a tiny fraction of the University's budget. the strike is a very real challenge to the administration's powerful grip on institutional policies.
For the first time since the 1970 Black Action Movement (BAM) strike, part of the the University is being taken out of the hands of it's administrators. Instead, at least some of the shots are being called by low-ranking scholars with a messy hall in East Quad as their headquarters.

THE STRONGER, THE SHORTER

It wasn't so easy to explain to other students and graduate employees, however. large numbers of whom continued to brush past picket lines. In fact, the GEO could not even claim that a majority of its state-defined. 2200 membership was on strike.
Because of a state labor decision, the TA union now includes research and staff assistants, most of whom have never joined. Strikers are concentrated in the humanities and social science departments of the literary college teaching assistants in the college's natural science departments are largely unorganized.

GEO has predicted a snowballing effect among unorganized graduate employees, but it may not have enough committed people in the isolated departments and schools to pull it off. In these places graduate assistants are not only less inclined to politics and face more certain job futures, but also tend to be tied more closely to their professors.
The only union to refuse to cross the picket lines is the Teamsters, although token endorsements and small contributions have been advanced by the UAW and two area labor councils. Response from other unions on campus has been weak, partly because effective action is prohibited by contracts and partly because the other campus unions are timid.
The union's strongest support is coming from graduate and undergraduate students in the literary college. Centers are the Pilot Program, which is jeopardized by budget cuts and whose survival is one of the GEO's demands; and the Residential College, which has contributed several hundred pickets a day and serves as the GEO command post.
While some professors have cancelled classes, others have persevered or even hardlined scheduling exams and threatening reprisals against strike supporters.
"In my dorm a lot of people were happy they didn't have to go to classes," said a Couzens resident, "But now they're getting impatient. it [the strike] is only gonna hurt us, because we're going to get the D's and E's, and it'll be the teaching assistants who give them to us."
Such feelings were too ambivalent for the GEO 's comfort. Organizing meetings and drives were being set up in the undergraduate dormitories. A great deal of the GEO's bargaining power depends on empty classrooms and strong picket lines. As of this writing, it looked like a strike headed for a second week.