Syracuse University graduate students detail service employee unionization drive

By Casey Darnell, writer for The Daily Orange | Published on January 22, 2018; Updated January 23, 2018

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Photo by Kai Nguyen, Photo Editor

Brian Hennigan, a geography Ph.D student and adjunct professor at Syracuse University, sometimes doesn’t have enough money to buy groceries, he said.

He’ll make $5,000 this semester, but he still must pay $1,600 toward his annual employee health insurance plan, he added.

“I’m very ashamed to say this, but I have to lean on my parents for occasional emergency bailouts when I just don’t have the money to make rent,” Hennigan, 31, said.

In an effort to improve his working conditions, and the working conditions of other graduate student workers, Hennigan is helping organize Syracuse Graduate Employees United, which announced a unionization drive near the end of the fall semester in an effort to represent graduate students who work on campus as teaching or research assistants.

About 1,200 graduate students work in those positions at the university. Like full-time faculty, these student workers receive employee health insurance and file W-2 income tax forms from SU.

Most departments provide stipends and additional funding to cover some of the cost of graduate studies.

But the wages graduate workers are paid as teaching or research assistants is too little, Hennigan said, and a result is that graduate students struggle to pay for basic amenities.

“We are kind of stuck in this prolonged adolescence where we just can’t afford to live like an adult,” Hennigan said.

Hennigan said TA wages are, “less than a living wage as calculated in Syracuse.” According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s wage calculator, the living wage in Syracuse is $22,031 annually before taxes.

Despite students’ dissatisfaction with their working conditions, some said they believe they have no say about what goes into their contracts.

“As it is now, we are handed contracts, and it is either take it or leave it,” said Laura Jaffee, who is currently in her fourth year of Ph.D studies in cultural foundations of education. Both Jaffee and Hennigan are on SGEU’s organizing committee.

In her first year of graduate school, Jaffee said she was promised eligibility on the employee health insurance plan for four years as part of her fellowship. The university tried to take all graduate student workers off the employee plan in spring 2015, instead, she said.

The university decided not to take all graduate workers off the employee health care, but it did take fellows, including Jaffee, off the employee plan, she said.

“It really made it clear that we were powerless unless we organized,” Jaffee said.

Both Hennigan and Jaffee said the health insurance scare in 2015 is what motivated many graduate students to form a union. Since then, Hennigan said he and other graduate students have been exploring unionization privately in fear of retaliation from the administration.

That changed in November, when SGEU publicly announced their union drive and affiliation with Service Employees International Union. SEIU has been assisting the union drive mostly through guidance, Jaffee said.

About 12 to 14 regularly attend the organizing committee’s meetings, but more people reached out to the organizers after the November rally, Hennigan said.

SGEU will spend the spring semester determining what concerns graduate student workers may have with their working conditions, Hennigan said.

One of those issues includes formalizing grievance procedures, Hennigan said.

“The person you’re bringing issues to might be your professor, might be on your committee, might be your adviser,” Hennigan said. “It makes that sort of confrontation very scary, and it could have unforeseen effects on your letters of recommendation, on your grades, whether you can (get) an assistantship the next year.”

Peter Vanable, associate provost and dean of the Graduate School, said in a statement Monday that the university welcomes, “continued dialogue on the concerns and needs of our graduate student population.”

“Strong collaboration between the University and Graduate Student Organization (GSO) has led to significant progress on important issues including but not limited to compensation, healthcare and childcare during the past several years,” Vanable said.

Unlike a union, GSO does not have legal power to negotiate with the university if an employee has an issue, said Jack Wilson, the organization’s president.

A union would only represent graduate students who are employees.

“The GSO has in the past worked well with the university on a number of issues, including housing,” Wilson said. “I have no issue to believe that if a union were to form that would change in the slightest.”

In an interview last December, Chancellor Kent Syverud said he was not aware of the union drive until SGEU held the rally on the Quad in November to protest the GOP tax plan that would have eliminated graduate students’ tuition waivers.

“We don’t have a position yet,” Syverud said at the time. “But we’ll spend the next month or two figuring it out.”