We’ll keep this one short: yes.
We know we can win for a few reasons. First, we’ve done it before. Before our organizing began in 2019, graduate workers were paid $15k a year, with $1,435 in student fees ($3000 for international students) being paid back to the university—just $1,200 above the poverty line at the time.
After our 2022 strike, graduate workers won the biggest raise on campus in over a decade: 46% and a new minimum stipend of $22,000 dollars for 10 months. That strike also ended the mandatory student fees charged to graduate students every year. After our three-day strike in 2024, we won consistent wage yearly increases for the university minimum stipend.
This April, just by threatening a strike, we won protections for international students, including guarantees for student status and a path to degree for students whose SEVIS status was revoked, and a commitment not to proactively comply with ICE.
But we know we can win for a far simpler reason: the university heavily relies on grad labor to sustain its day-to-day operations, whether that’s in the classroom, office, archive, or lab. Collectively, graduate workers in solidarity with each other have massive leverage over the university. We won in 2022 because our strike disrupted more than 80,000 labor hours. Moreover, the university itself is a huge portion of the regional and state economy. Graduate workers standing in solidarity and withholding labor isn’t just impacting a few administrators; if we’re strong, it impacts the entire state economy. We can win because our labor is too important to the university to ignore. But that is only possible when we all stand together as graduate workers.
The first step? Signing a union card. Even if you’ve signed a union card in past semesters, be sure to sign this new card! We can win big, but to do that means we have to stand together.