Syracuse University grad students want to unionize to improve wages, working conditions

By James T. Mulder, writer for Syracuse.com | Published on January 17, 2023

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Syracuse, N.Y. – Syracuse University graduate student workers want to unionize in order to improve their wages and working conditions.

The students announced today they hope to join forces with SEIU Local 200.

“We don’t make a living wage and it’s incredibly hard for many students to meet all their basic needs like housing and food,” said Amanda Beavin, an SU graduate assistant in public administration and public affairs.

There are about 1,000 graduate student workers at SU. They work as teaching assistants, researchers and in other positions.

The organizing campaign at SU comes at a time when graduate student instructors and researchers are unionizing on a growing number of U.S. campuses. The national wave of unionization has been energized by a six-week strike by 48,000 unionized graduate student workers at the University of California. That strike ended last month after the university gave the student workers a 46% wage increase.

In the wake of that strike, the largest in the history of American higher education, SU and several other schools have announced they will boost stipends for graduate students.

SU plans to increase minimum stipends from $16,980 to $20,000 for master’s student workers and from $16,980 to $22,000 for doctoral students. The pay raises will begin in the 2023-2024 academic year. SU said it is also improving health insurance and child care subsidies for graduate student workers.

“Our graduate students play an important role in our community,” Gretchen Ritter, an SU vice chancellor, said in a recent letter to students. “Not only are they training to be the next generation of educators, scholars, researchers and administrators, but they’re also helping to teach and support our undergraduate students.”

Beavins said the wage increases offered by SU are inadequate. “We still maintain that is not a living wage,” she said.

Graduate students are only supposed to work 20 hours a week, but often put in more hours than that to meet the demands of their jobs, Beavins said. Most graduate workers’ contracts prohibit them from taking second jobs outside the university, she said.

The grad students working to organize a union call themselves, “Syracuse Graduate Employees United.”

“SU works because we do,” the group says on its web site. “Yet, our highly skilled labor is met with poverty wages and precarious working conditions.”

Graduate student workers at Yale recently voted to unionize and the election was certified by the National Labor Relations Board.

Graduate workers also recently voted to unionize at Northwestern University, Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Beavins said many graduate workers at SU have signed cards saying they support unionization. But union organizers have not yet asked the National Labor Relations Board to conduct an election, she said.

An election would not be necessary if SU decided to voluntarily recognize the union, she said.

SEIU already represents about 900 SU workers including custodians, housekeepers, maintenance and good service workers and library technicians.