SU Grad Workers Demand Free, Quality Healthcare

By the Syracuse Graduate Employees United Organizing Committee for The Daily Orange | Published on February 25, 2018

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The SU administration is attempting to massively downgrade graduate workers’ health insurance benefits. In recent weeks, graduate student employees have received emails advertising “forums” and “office hours” to discuss how best to “optimize” graduate workers’ health insurance, which we’ve learned will be accomplished by kicking us off our current employee health plan. This is nothing less than an attack on our living standards and the university diminishing our role as employees.

Rather than optimization, the Aetna plan is primarily a means for the administration to cut the cost of graduate student labor by minimizing its contribution. Although the Aetna plan, so the administration tells us, could reduce costs overall, it bases its numbers on the assumption that graduate workers are and will be perennially healthy, requiring only occasional check-ups. The Aetna plan will negatively impact student workers needing recurrent treatment and/or serious operations — and those who might in the future. The Aetna plan is more affordable so long as we do not really use it.

Despite all the administration’s lip service to accessibility, reducing health benefits and options blatantly contradicts their #AccessibleSU campaign. It’s a slap in the face to graduate workers, both disabled and able-bodied, who chose SU because of the protections offered by an employee health care plan.

Only organized pressure, power and action will win meaningful changes. In 2015, the administration attempted to move graduate student employees onto the student health insurance plan, prompting the GSO to censure the administration for its undemocratic, untransparent actions and pass a resolution exploring unionization. Graduate students collectively resisted the attempt to steal our health insurance, and the administration reneged.

The administration is counting on graduate workers to remain uninformed, uninvolved and unorganized. But we’re now more organized than ever. Syracuse Graduate Employees United is a group of teaching assistants, fellows, researchers and students working to build a union to collectively bargain and stop these decisions about our working conditions being made without us. Graduate workers at NYU unionized and now the university pays 90 percent of health care premiums, covers 100 percent of the cost of basic dental insurance and set aside funds for child and family health care. We can accomplish this, too.

We deserve and demand that all graduate workers — including fellows — are given the option to choose either the Aetna student plan or the employee benefit plan during the open enrollment period each academic year.

Syracuse Graduate Employees United Organizing Committee