Graduate student workers at SU announce campaign to unionize

By Jana Seal, writer for The Daily Orange | Published on January 17, 2023

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Graduate student workers at Syracuse University announced their intent to form a graduate student union Tuesday morning at a press conference on the steps of Hendricks Chapel, citing excessive teaching demands for unlivable wages and minimal benefits.

In a Tuesday press release, Syracuse Graduate Employees United announced the conference and their campaign to establish a graduate student labor union at SU. The release identified a slew of factors necessitating a union, including poor benefits, lacking worker protections and the combination of low stipends and high workloads. Students also highlighted a specific lack of support for international graduate student employees and graduate student workers of color.

Caitlin Smith, a fourth-year PhD candidate in SU’s Human Development and Family Science program, said she’s been working to form a graduate student workers’ union from the time she arrived at SU four years ago. She began needing to take on jobs outside of her academics on top of assistantships and teaching positions.

She said she found out at the end of the fall 2022 semester that she wouldn’t have a teaching job in the spring of 2023 after being a TA for six courses and teaching another six over the course of three years.

“That’s where my heart breaks a little, is when this university needed me, I showed up and I went above and beyond every time,” Smith said. “But when I needed this university, when I needed reliable funding to finish my dissertation so I could graduate after years of teaching for low pay and minimal training, Syracuse University didn’t show up for me.”

Franki Compere and Austin Lewter, graduate students in SU’s biology and African American studies departments respectively, spoke about how lacking healthcare benefits for graduate students has impacted them while at SU. Compere, who has Type 1 diabetes, emphasized that without financial support from family members, she would be unable to afford her life-saving insulin.

“I’ve had to really rely on my family every single day to help support me through this, and without them I would never be here,” Compere said. “And that’s not okay. There shouldn’t be barriers put in place of higher education by financial worries and financial distress.”

Compere added that poor benefits and financial support have caused her “immeasurable” distress in making ends meet as a graduate student at SU, even as a student in a well-funded STEM department. Joseph Beckmann, a third-year PhD candidate in the mathematics department, said that while graduate school leadership acknowledges the value of the department’s research output, that also means high teaching demands for TAs.

“We recognize this importance, and we want to do our jobs well,” Beckmann said. “We’re here because we enjoy it. We want to do it well, but we can’t if we’re not treated well. (There’s) not enough support for teachers.”

In an interview with The Daily Orange, Smith spoke about the value of collaboration between graduate students in STEM departments receiving higher funding and those receiving stipends at or closer to the current minimum of $16,980 per academic year.

“Once folks in STEM (who) are making $29,000 a year, which is still far below living wage, … are realizing a lot of us are making $16,000, they’re suddenly up in arms as well because they don’t want to see us all living in poverty,” she said. “I guess that’s what brought us together, is realizing we’re barely surviving.”

In a Friday news release, SU announced that in addition to increasing summer funding and stipends as well as guaranteeing four years of funding for PhD students, it would be raising stipends for masters and PhD students by around 18% and 30% respectively, beginning in the 2023-24 academic year. The announcement is the only movement Smith said she’s seen in a long time.

“I’ve been here for years, we have been begging for more than a 2.5% increase. We have been told it is not possible over and over and over again,” Smith said. “A few days before we announced our union, I’m so excited to say we all got a 25% increase. So that is wonderful. That just comes to show the power of collective action.”

Terese Millet Joseph, an immigrant and a student of color, spoke at the conference about her experience of feeling she was only valued as a TA who gets the job done. She said her personhood and humanity have gone unacknowledged during her time as a PhD candidate in Human Development and Family Science at SU, but that she’s found community in the union.

In an address during the press conference, New York Immigration Coalition Manager of Member Engagement Kayla Kelechian de Bravo emphasized the power of and right to organizing for immigrants and students of color like Millet Joseph.

“Hearing all the stories here today only confirms that for Black, brown and immigrant communities. Organizing will continue to be our vehicle for change for access and equity,” de Bravo said. “And today’s the day that we remind our international student employees who make up 40% of student employees that you have the federally protected right to organize alongside your co-workers to form a union and negotiate free of intimidation, free of all things can be done regardless of your immigration status, period.”

SGEU is working with SEIU Local 200United — a larger union spanning New York state, Vermont and Pennsylvania — in its campaign for unionization, which began internally in 2021, according to SGEU’s website. Now, in launching the campaign publicly, SGEU is set to hold an election to implement the union in the event SU chooses not to voluntarily recognize it.

Bruce Baigrie, an international graduate student in the Geography department, said that even though the union already has a simple majority, SGEU still needs support and wants to show up with numbers the university can’t ignore.

“We want to send a message on election day. We want to strengthen our hand so that we can have the strongest position when we’re bargaining to address some of the heinous things that you’ve heard today,” Baigrie said. “Because if we come together we will be unstoppable and that’s a fact.”

Published on January 17, 2023 at 10:02 pm

Contact Jana: jlseal@syr.edu | @JanaLoSeal