GEO (The Graduate Employee Organization) – Your Contract and Your Union
If you’re an incoming graduate student, accepting your department’s offer probably involved accepting a funding letter that told you where your money would come from for the next few years. If some of that funding will come from teaching, then there’s an even more important document that you might not yet know exists: the contract between the university and GEO (the graduate employee labour union) that guarantees the employment conditions of all graduate student instructors. Before I say a bit about what GEO is and how it works, let’s have a look at the contract and in particular the parts of it that especially affect international students. It’s online here , and worth getting to know. It’s renegotiated every couple of years—most recently in 2010 and 2013—and issues that affect international students are always under discussion. So what has GEO achieved for international students recently? A few examples below from the last two contract-revisions: Did you know that once you s...