GEO Circulates COVID-19 Safety Petition with More Than 1,200 Signatures
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Tuesday, January 25, 2022
Contacts:
Lesley Owens
Co-President
(785) 766-8921
Chelsea Birchmier
Solidarity Committee Co-Chair
Owen MacDonald, Angela Ting
Communications Officers
Champaign-Urbana, IL - GEO Circulates COVID-19 Safety Petition with More Than 1,200 Signatures
1,226 workers, students, and community members and four campus worker organizations demanded safety from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this week.
The UIUC Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) members circulated a petition in the first week of classes in response to the COVID-19 cases on campus, the highest numbers experienced since the beginning of the pandemic. 3,637 cases of COVID-19 were detected on campus in the first three weeks of the year–more cases than were detected in the Spring 2021 and Fall 2021 semesters combined. GEO members reported concerns about their safety, the safety of their students, and overwork related to student absences and illness.
Undergraduate students, graduate student workers, faculty, staff, alumni, and Champaign-Urbana community members made up the more than 1,200 co-signers on the petition. These individuals were joined by GEO, the Campus Faculty Association (CFA); the Non-Tenure Faculty Association (NTFC), Local #6546, IFT/AFT; and the Uni Faculty Organization (UFO).
The petition demands that UIUC Provost Andreas Cangellaris and Chancellor Robert Jones protect students and workers through the following measures:
Provide a notification system for any in-class or workplace exposures, which should not be based on self-reporting or app proximity notifications but on the class schedule and/or assigned workplaces of those who test positive.
Require all on-campus community members (students, faculty, and staff) to test twice per week, regardless of vaccination status, as well as create an adequate system to consistently check people’s building status before they enter learning and working spaces.
Provide all on-campus students and workers with 16 medical-grade N95 or KN95 masks.
Worker choice so that workers may choose whether they are safest working in-person, in a hybrid format, or online.
GEO members have asked for a response to their petition by Friday, January 28 and a town hall with campus leadership by February 4.
“Everyone who signed this petition cares deeply about the safety of our community,” GEO co-president Lesley Owens said. “We expect our campus leadership to do the same.”
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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