by B.W. Sculos
Rio Grande Valley United Faculty, TFA/TSTA, NEA member (Personal capacity)
Edinburg, TX
Union activity and popularity are on the rise across the United States. A major aspect of these increases is rooted in the tireless efforts of graduate student workers. Graduate students have organized new unions where they didn’t exist, particularly at private universities, and both new and established graduate student unions are fighting for higher wages, better working conditions, and good benefits.
The Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (part of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2322) is one of the oldest and most active graduate student unions in the U.S., having formed in 1992. GEO represents 2,500 workers on the UMass Amherst campus, including teaching assistants (who either assist faculty in teaching courses or independently teach their own courses), as well as research assistants (who work alongside faculty on research projects). GEO workers are paid less than $25,000 per year. Almost half are international students, and many are parents of young children. Faced with the rising cost of living, housing affordability crisis, and low pay, these workers consistently struggle to make ends meet.
GEO members are in the opening rounds of negotiating their next contract with the university. The union is demanding a 15% pay raise over the next three years, a year-round $400 per month housing stipend, the removal of all student fees, and a larger contribution to their Health and Wellness Trust that provides free dental and vision insurance to workers. Other demands include greater protection against sexual, racial, and other workplace harassment and bullying, and the right to grieve non-reappointment (i.e., termination) decisions.
Housing is as expensive as ever, costing upwards of $1800 per month—and that’s for university-sponsored family housing. A decent single occupancy apartment off-campus in the Amherst area costs around $1500. This leaves grad students who make around $2400 per month with between $600 and $900 per month to cover all their expenses including utilities, transportation, food, uncovered health care costs, childcare, etc. “Graduate students with families, if you’re renting a house and you can’t have roommates and you have 2 kids, $2400 a month is really not going to cut it,” says Johnny Rasnic, a GEO member in the mathematics department and steward co-chair.
Graduate student workers have huge demands on their time and are expected to spend 30-40 hours per week preparing for and attending their own classes or working on their own research in addition to their paid work responsibilities that are supposedly capped at 20 hours per week. “A lot of these students [research assistants], even though they have 20 hour contracts, will do 40-50 a week of work,” says Rasnic. Ask any grad student worker and they’ll tell you the hours can vary significantly week-to-week and supervisor to supervisor. Often graduate students end up working as much as 70+ hours per week.
The university has repeatedly told these workers struggling to make ends meet to simply get another job. GEO workers want to know, with what time the university would like them to get this additional job when they are working upwards of 60 hours per week already? Even though they are only paid for up to 20 hours per week, they lose their employment if they don’t maintain progress toward their degrees. And for the nearly half of GEO workers who are international students, this cruel suggestion is actually illegal, since international students are limited by federal immigration laws from working more than 20 hours a week.
Universities rely on grad student workers as a cheap source of labor to cut down on the higher costs of having more full-time tenure-track faculty teach and conduct research. GEO members have long accused UMass Amherst of misrepresenting how many classes are taught by professors to prospective students. The school includes classes taught entirely by graduate student workers as among the “90% of courses” supposedly taught by professors. In fact, grad workers teach 60% of undergraduate courses entirely on their own.
In the coming weeks and months, GEO and the university are going to continue to negotiate, but the union is not optimistic the university will simply accede to their demands. GEO is calling on members to step up and get more engaged in the process. GEO had over 40 members show up to the first negotiating meeting, and the university showed up with no offer at all. In July, the university illegally raised grad student workers’ health care premiums by 10% without giving GEO advance notice, preempting the union from bargaining over the change. GEO has since filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge against the school. The union’s last contract fight, which lasted 11 months and covered 2020-2023, was only ratified in September 2022, meaning that for almost 2 years, members worked without a contract. The new chancellor has also refused to meet with the union, responding that the only graduate student representative body he’d acknowledge was the Graduate Student Senate.More aggressive and public-facing actions will help the union win their necessary wage and benefit increases. These may include marches, rallies, standouts, and other direct actions. This past year, members organized at the Worcester Dining Center to gather community support for their contract fight. Rasnic recalls: “We were asking people to sign our petition and stuff, it was very very visible. I mean hundreds of people saw what we were doing that day and I think it hit a nerve with them [the administration] and got them to concede to give us a good deal…At the end of the day, that’s where our power lies. When we can’t strike, that’s what we have to do, is tell people ‘hey, we’re the ones who make shit run around here, and we are not going to let the university prop its own image up without us.’” GEO has also organized rallies on move-in day to inform students and parents about their concerns. They even successfully blocked the university from increasing on-campus rents for grad workers. The Independent Socialist Group (ISG) supports GEO’s demands and stands in solidarity with them to win what they need to live a decent life from a university that doesn’t respect them but couldn’t function without them. ISG calls for a united fight alongside all unions at the UMass Amherst campus for improved wages, for higher funding for public higher education, and for the right to strike for public employees in Massachusetts. All workers and socialists should actively support GEO in this struggle.
Independent Socialist Group 