As a member of the steering committee at the Graduate Employees' Union at Michigan State University, please allow me to respond to Patrick Kocovsky's letter (Sept. 9), in which he makes several inaccurate claims regarding our new contract.

Kocovsky seems to believe the only thing a union looks for is money. This shows how little he knows about collective bargaining. While the GEU did win a substantial raise (a minimum of 5.5 percent over last year, not the 2 percent he claims), unions are about a lot more than money.

We also won paid job training, domestic partner benefits, free mammograms for all female graduate employees, fair hiring practices, protections from overwork, enhanced workplace safety rules, professional development, a freeze on fees for international students, and a fair and impartial grievance procedure, which includes binding arbitration by a neutral third party. Does Kocovsky care about any of these things, or is he just interested in money?

These kinds of benefits are only possible with a graduate employee union. Without a legally binding contract to protect our rights and provide remedies for mistreatment, everything we have won could vanish in a heartbeat. Michigan, like Pennsylvania, is suffering a massive budget crisis right now, but with our union contract, we know we are safe. Too many of us remember the early 1990s, when, to buy us off so we wouldn't form a union, the MSU administration gave us a new health plan. Year after year, however, they took pieces of it away, and there was nothing we could do about it. Sound familiar?

I urge all graduate employees at Penn State to protect their rights, trust democracy and join the Graduate and Fixed-Term Employee Organization.