GEO demands comprehensive exposure notifications and transparency from UIUC amidst the current wave of COVID-19

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Wednesday, September 15th 2021

Contacts:

Karla Sanabria-Véaz
Officer-at-Large
787-203-5958
officer2@uigeo.org

Owen MacDonald, Angela Ting
Communications Officers
commcomm@uigeo.org

GEO demands comprehensive exposure notifications and transparency from UIUC amidst the current wave of COVID-19.   

Champaign-Urbana, IL - The Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) demands responsibility and transparency from the administration of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. 

As of September 14th 2021, the COVID-19 dashboard has reported 546 COVID-19 cases since the start of the school year on August 23, with most of them occurring in vaccinated individuals. Despite this high number of cases, only about 7% of campus members are testing each day.

Despite these cases on campus, GEO members receive no notification from the university if they are exposed in the classroom where they teach. In fact, the university forbids instructors from notifying their students of an in-class exposure and expects students and workers to "self-contact trace." However, graduate teaching assistants across the university have been told of their exposure by a student.

According to Officer-at-Large, Karla Sanabria-Véaz, the university has been irresponsible in effectively notifying COVID-19 exposure to students. “The university has an institutional responsibility to keep us safe and this has been solely relegated to already exploited TAs in precarious working conditions. I learned that I was exposed to COVID-19 thanks to the honesty of a student that notified us. It’s been more than two weeks and the university hasn’t informed me nor my co-workers. No student nor worker should go through this situation.”

The university has allowed major gaps in exposure notifications on campus. UIUC’s Safer Illinois app only notifies a person of exposure if they’ve been within 10 feet of someone with COVID-19 for at least 2 hours, which means that most people exposed in most classrooms are not being notified of possible exposures. The CU Public Health Department is only notifying people of exposure (which they define as being within 6 feet of someone for 15 minutes or more) if they are NOT vaccinated (see the recent COVID-19 Briefing Series around minute 39). 

This means that Sanabria-Véaz and other GEO members like her receive no notification when one of their students has tested positive for COVID-19. Ferderick Pardoe, a GEO member in Physics, explains that “During an average discussion, I spend several minutes individually explaining concepts to  most of the 18 students as they work through their problems. Doing this requires me to bend down near them so that I can either look over their work, or show them my notebook. As a result of this, my face is almost constantly within a foot of the face of one of 36 students over a combined period of about three hours on a weekly basis. As a result, there are plenty of opportunities for me to catch COVID from an infectious student, for me to spread it to the rest of my sections, and for my students to spread it to their groups. For this reason, it would seem absolutely vital to me that my students and I be notified if a student in one of my sections had COVID”.

Out of necessity, graduate workers have taken their safety into their own hands. Grad c workers in the English Department presented a letter representing 80% of grad students in the department demanding that the department and the university respect worker choice to move classes online, provide sufficient PPE and technological equipment to do their labor, and improve the university’s COVID-19 notification system. English Department grad student and GEO Co-President Lesley Owens says, “Our department’s response has been good, but university policy is putting us all at risk. UIUC must do better. We deserve a safe workplace”.

The GEO’s COVID-19 Impact Bargaining team has met with UIUC administration fifteen times thus far, including an upcoming bargaining session on September 24. During the next Impact Bargaining session, the GEO will again present their key demands, including extending sick leave benefits, respecting worker choice to move classes online in collaboration with students, and for the university to assume their institutional responsibility in effectively communicating COVID-19 exposure to students and faculty. 

Sanabria-Véaz concludes, “Our demands are only fair and just for all the unpaid labor graduate students have been forced to do while navigating the traumatic experience of COVID-19. In these past 18 months of bargaining with the university, we’ve only been silenced and policed by the university. It’s time we push our movement to the streets to show that the university works because WE do.”

The Graduate Employees’ Organization, AFT/IFT Local 6300, AFL-CIO, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, represents approximately 2,700 Teaching and Graduate Assistants on the UIUC Campus. In November 2009 and in February 2018, over 1,000 GEO members and allies participated in a strike to secure a fair contract and a more accessible UIUC campus. With an active presence in the community, the GEO continues to work for high-quality and accessible public education in Illinois.

For more information, please contact geo@uigeo.org. More information can also be found on GEO’s website at www.uiucgeo.org.

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