GEO organizers promote the RA unionization drive. Photo by Sandra Voskoboynikova, used by permission
The research assistants (RAs) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have officially joined GEO, the Graduate Educators Organization (GEO Local 6300 IFT/AFT AFL-CIO) at UIUC. The organization now represents teaching assistants (TAs), graduate assistants (GAs), pre-professional graduate assistants (PGAs), and RAs on the UIUC campus.
On May 15, 2025, RAs submitted their formal unionization interest petition to the GEO, the culmination of a campaign that began in September, 2024. On July 10 they held their official election and voted “yes” for union representation by an overwhelming majority—over 95 percent asked to be included in the membership of the GEO at Illinois. On July 22, the Illinois Labor Relations Board officially recognized GEO as the representative for RAs at the university. This was a history-making effort that represents both the first successful effort to unionize RAs at the university and the cementing of GEO’s efforts to represent all graduate employees. Following the successful election, the GEO has officially become one of the largest unions of higher education employees on a single campus in the country, and is now the state of Illinois’s second-largest educators’ union.
By choosing GEO representation, RAs have immediately gained key workplace protections, such as entitlement to union representation at investigatory interviews, known as Weingarten rights, particularly if they think that the proceedings might lead to any kind of disciplinary action. The next step is negotiating additional protections under their first contract. In the newly begun academic year, GEO will negotiate the inclusion of RAs under its existing collective bargaining agreement with the university, which will streamline organizing efforts and help ensure that RAs are given the same benefits and consideration by the university as their TA, GA, and PGA colleagues. The membership ratification vote, which closed on September 3, passed, allowing RAs to be officially included in GEO’s contract.
GEO’s recent successful efforts to unionize RAs and PGAs began in 2018. When GEO’s original bargaining unit unionized TAs and GAs in 2002, the state of Illinois legally regarded RAs and PGAs as students and not as workers, and thus barred them from inclusion. During 2018/19 GEO members and their allies successfully lobbied the Illinois legislature to change the laws that govern RA and PGA status; the status change legally recognized them as workers and allowed them to unionize if they chose. GEO began the process of organizing RAs and PGAs to petition to join their ranks after the changed laws from 2019 took effect in 2020.
During the 2023/24 school year—following pandemic lockdowns and GEO’s own 2022/23 contract bargaining campaign—plans to help RAs and PGAs officially unionize took shape. PGAs organized and officially joined GEO by majority interest petition during the same academic year. (Their Memorandum of Agreement can be viewed here.) UIUC RAs launched their unionization campaign the following academic year, collecting signatures; hosting meetings and town hall-style gatherings for RAs to give testimony about their working conditions and what they would like to achieve through membership; and getting the word out about how GEO membership could provide better support for RAs at Illinois. It became clear almost immediately that organizing was not just the pet project of a few people.
Kuyper Santora, one of GEO’s organizers for the campaign, described the testimonies of RAs as revealing the overwork and unsafe working conditions that they were experiencing—the meat and drink of GEO’s work. The more other RAs heard their peers’ accounts of their experiences, the faster the movement came together. Changes in US immigration under the Trump administration that affected student visas also helped to galvanize RA support to unionize. Reports that more than 50 students received short-notice visa revocations (for F-1 and J-1 visas) via email in March, giving them one week to leave the United States, justifiably unsettled international students and their GEO colleagues; a lukewarm response from university administration shook a lot of students’ confidence that the university is invested in their ability to complete their programs and their feeling that they belong on campus. During the eight-month campaign organizers posted themselves at tables across campus to raise awareness about the campaign, organized events, made office visits, and spread the word far and wide about what the union could do for RAs. By the time it came to a petition, over 1300 RAs signed on to support unionization—35 percent of all RAs at UIUC, which tidily exceeds the statutory requirement of 30 percent needed to allow RAs to vote to be represented by GEO.
On May 9, GEO filed an official petition for certification of representation based on the initial signatures, which would allow RAs to vote on the issue of having GEO represent them. By May 15 the RAs had submitted their formal unionization petition, and on July 10 the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (IELRB) conducted the election that officially brought RAs into GEO membership. On July 22 the IELRB officially certified GEO as the exclusive representative of RAs on the UIUC campus.
Adding RAs to the collective bargaining agreement further enhances the benefits they are entitled to as university workers—another fight that GEO is perennially prepared to take to university administration. During the spring of 2025 they held impact bargaining sessions to mitigate harm caused by changes to health care coverage for graduate student employees and their dependents. The changes they fought for called for both financial relief and greater transparency, instead of proposed educational programs to help beneficiaries be “better health care consumers.” RAs at the University of Illinois have some of the most diverse and field-specific types of work—and, consequently, can have some of the most variable and potentially exploitative working conditions—of any graduate workers at the university. Including them in the protections for graduate student workers helps ensure that they can do their work safely and contest conditions that pose dangers to themselves or the progress of their degrees.
Organizing RAs benefits graduate student workers across the board, as many will have been a combination of TAs, GAs, RAs, or PGAs by the time they graduate; their benefits and representation will be the same regardless of how their work appointments may change from semester to semester. Given the increased enrollment of recent freshman classes, including 2024’s record-breaking Class of 2028, and the continuing need for research amid federal funding cuts, the chances that a graduate worker will only serve in one capacity—as a research assistant without ever teaching in a classroom, as a teaching assistant without ever having an administrative GA appointment, etc.—grow smaller every year. In that light, we can ill afford to forget that the University of Illinois works because of its graduate workers and would grind to a halt without them. Their GEO representatives continue to make sure that they can do the jobs and degree work that they signed up for when they said “yes” to enrolling at the University of Illinois.
Kathleen McGowan is a GEO member and a PhD candidate in musicology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She originally hails from Macomb, IL.
473 total views, 3 views today