The Graduate Employees’ Organization protested in front of the Michigan League Friday morning for better wages and working conditions for graduate student employees. The picket lasted until 9:30 a.m. when GEO and University of Michigan Human Resources were slated to meet for a contract bargaining session — a meeting which never occurred after Micki Czerniak, the mediator appointed by the Michigan Employment Relations Commission, suspended bargaining sessions for 28 days Feb. 12.
Picketers carried signs, calling for fair pay in GEO negotiations; resistance to repression, fascism and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and an expansion of Ann Arbor’s Unarmed Crisis Response Program, which would route non-criminal calls traditionally dispatched by police officers to trained unarmed crisis responders.
The protesters also coursed through various chants, including: “Ann Arbor is a union town, if we don’t get it, shut it down,” and, “United we bargain, divided we beg.” Other chants touted the power of labor unions and called for ICE to be barred from the U-M campus…