The following email was sent to faculty on November 5, 2026. It is published here for your convenience.

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to provide an update on the university’s negotiations with the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO). As we approach one year of bargaining, we remain committed to reaching an agreement that supports our graduate student employees and fulfills our responsibilities to the university community.

As of November 5, the parties have held 26 negotiating sessions and reached only five signed tentative agreements. More than 50 contract items remain unresolved. On September 18, the university presented a comprehensive package proposal that included a 10% salary increase over four years, or 2.5% each year of a four-year contract. GEO rejected that package. Its current salary proposal calls for, at minimum, a 27% raise, or an increase of at least 9% annually over three years.

Topics of Negotiation

Collective bargaining provides a means to negotiate compensation, benefits, and other conditions of employment, and we respect GEO’s role in advocating for the employees it represents. Progress requires both parties to engage substantively on mandatory subjects of bargaining and those that do not infringe on the academic autonomy of faculty.

Academic Autonomy

GEO remains focused on allowing graduate employees to decline teaching and research assignments because they disagree with the faculty instructor’s course content, or if the assignment conflicts with a GEO employee’s pedagogical judgment, ethical commitments, political, moral, or professional standards.

Permissive and Illegal Subjects

Many of GEO’s proposals concern what labor law calls permissive subjects: optional topics that neither party is required to negotiate. As a matter of law, neither may insist on negotiating them to the point of impasse. The university has repeatedly declined to bargain over GEO’s permissive proposals, and GEO continues to pass them, making resolution impossible.

At this time, GEO continues to focus the majority of its effort on negotiating permissive and illegal topics. These include:

• Abolishing the Division of Public Safety and Security
• Duration and application of PhD academic funding guarantees
• Probation and dismissal from academic programs
• Eliminating the Office of Student Accountability
• Proposals concerning the university’s investments

In many cases, GEO insists on bargaining over matters that explicitly and exclusively involve employees of other unions, which is illegal.

If a permissive topic is important to GEO, why not negotiate it with GEO?

In most cases, the union would be negotiating terms that would significantly affect parties and people they do not represent, including employees with collective bargaining agreements of their own, affecting their jobs, campus security, and more. That does not mean a topic is not important to the community, but it does mean that the topic is not appropriate for the GEO labor contract.

The university has repeatedly indicated that it will not negotiate these topics. By Michigan law, continuing to raise them is an unfair labor practice.

Wages and Benefits

The 2023–2026 agreement provided Ann Arbor graduate student instructors and graduate student staff assistants with salary increases of 8% in the first year and 6% in each of the following two years, for a total of a 20% increase over three (3) years. Benefits include employer payment of tuition, comprehensive health insurance with no monthly employee premium, paid medical and parental leave, and access to childcare subsidies for eligible student parents. These provisions support both their work and their primary reason for being here – the ability to complete a graduate education. Our current proposal would build on that support with further annual salary increases.

After nearly a year of negotiations, graduate student employees deserve meaningful progress toward an agreement. This includes Graduate Student Research Assistants, who have been a part of GEO for more than six months, but have not yet been incorporated into the contract and therefore have not received contractual benefits, such as access to the grievance process.

Since the current collective bargaining agreement does not set forth increases beyond the 2025-2026 academic year, GSIs, GSSAs, and GSRAs have not received a salary increase since September 2025; a timely focus on productive negotiations will allow the university to increase these employees’ wages.

Reaching an agreement will require a sustained focus on employment terms and a willingness to work through differences at the bargaining table through bargaining representatives, which is the norm in labor negotiations. The university’s negotiating team is doing that work, and we need GEO to engage in a timely and earnest way.

Fact-finding

To help move negotiations forward, the university petitioned the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC) on July 28 to appoint a neutral fact-finder. This process provides an independent review of unresolved issues and can produce nonbinding recommendations to help the parties reach agreement. Fact-finding is underway.

The Possibility of Labor Actions

Throughout this process, our responsibility to undergraduate students also remains paramount. Recent social media posts from GEO have indicated the possibility that the organization may vote to strike in the near future; when asked about this possibility directly, GEO representatives declined to answer.

Public sector workers are not legally permitted to strike in Michigan. As an extra measure to prevent disruption to our education and research missions, the GEO contract explicitly prohibits striking. Nevertheless, GEO has gone on strike twice in the last six years. GEO’s last strike, in 2023, lasted more than four months.

Students and their families make substantial commitments to a Michigan education. They must be able to count on classes meeting, timely feedback on coursework, and continuing academic progress. Any intentional disruption of that work is unacceptable. Deans and departments are prepared to continue operations in the event of an illegal job action. The university is prepared to use available resources and measures to deliver on our commitment to our students.

I know that faculty members care deeply about their graduate students. I share that concern. Our goal is an agreement that supports graduate employees, respects the academic responsibilities and discretion of individual faculty members, and allows the university’s teaching and research to proceed without disruption.

We will continue to provide updates through the GEO negotiations website and the labor negotiations newsletter. Thank you for your continued commitment to our students and to the work of the university.

Sincerely,

Laurie K. McCauley, DDS, MS, PhD
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
William K. and Mary Anne Najjar Professor