A nationwide movement by graduate students to organize for better pay and treatment is continuing in Worcester, where students at two universities have taken major steps this month in bargaining with their respective institutions.
The Worcester Polytechnic Institute Graduate Workers’ Union filed papers to organize with the National Labor Relations Board on Sept. 19. Meanwhile, at Clark University, students in Clark University Graduate Workers United voted with 97% in favor to authorize a strike earlier this month.
“Having input in our compensation or working conditions is really important to us,” said Jake Scarponi, a member of the WPI GWU organizing committee. “We naturally think that having this very highly democratic and legally binding mechanism by which to make WPI basically take our input means that we’ll be able to make better policies with them.... We’re the ones that are affected the most by those policy decisions, so we know how they can be changed for the better, better than anybody else.”
Scarponi said students at WPI are concerned about the cost of living in Worcester, where according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a single adult with no children needs to make $18.12 per hour to survive, or about $37,600 per year. He said graduate students at WPI typically make around $30,000, and that’s only if they work year-round, which few do.
“It feels like we’re being treated like students when it’s convenient and workers when it’s convenient,” Scarponi said. “Resources aren’t really being distributed in a way that is conducive to us feeling like we matter on campus.”
In addition, during the pandemic, graduate student health insurance premiums went up significantly, on top of students being required to pay for COVID-19 testing as most did not have the option to work remotely.
Some students have also faced issues with their principal investigators who guide their research work, and feel that they don’t have a path of recourse that doesn’t jeopardize their education. International students whose visas are dependent on staying tied to the university have felt especially vulnerable, Scarponi said.
“WPI graduate student workers are a vital part of our community, and we support their rights to organize and hold an election to decide whether they will be represented by a union,” wrote WPI Interim Provost Art Heinricher in an email to students and staff on Monday, adding that he believed students should have the opportunity to vote in a union election. “WPI is committed to fostering a supportive and respectful learning and working environment for everyone, and we look forward to listening, learning, and talking more with our graduate student workers about all of this. When the university receives notification from the NLRB, we will follow their procedures in the spirit of collaboration.”
WPI and Clark are the latest of graduate students at a series of colleges and universities across the country pushing to unionize. Last year, members of the Harvard Graduate Student Union went on strike for three days, their second strike in three years, while students at Columbia University in New York ended a 10-week strike in January.
Other colleges and universities in Massachusetts which have seen organizing among graduate students include Boston College, Boston University, MIT, Northeastern University, University of Massachusetts Amherst and more.
At Clark, graduate students have faced similar struggles. A member survey conducted by the union in March showed that the biggest priority across the board was higher stipends, but members also wanted full coverage of health insurance and contributions toward dental and vision insurance and child care, benefits that graduate students do not currently receive, according to organizing committee member William Westgard-Cruice.
The union has been in negotiations with Clark since April, but so far have not had success, prompting the strike vote. While the union has not gone on strike yet, they are now ready to do so if they feel the need arise.
“The lawyers of Clark University spent a lot of time stalling, raising issues about things that were already long-established at other universities with graduate worker unions, pretending to raise concerns about academic freedom, for instance, which really has nothing to do with the questions that are negotiated in a collective bargaining agreement,” Westgard-Cruice said, noting that over the past two years that students have been organizing, inflation has been going up. “Some of us have gotten no raises over that time. ... So over the past few years, we’ve progressively gotten poorer and poorer and poorer.”
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Clark University spokesperson Angela Bazydlo declined to comment on the ongoing union deliberations.
“As a university, we are firmly committed to providing an exceptional experience for our graduate students,” Bazydlo said in a statement to MassLive. “Last spring, our students voted to be represented by the union – a decision we have respected and honored. A next step following the election is a collective bargaining process to craft a contract. The University continues to work in good faith to complete the collective bargaining process and finalize a contract, and we are well ahead of the usual timeline for negotiations of this kind, which generally exceeds a full year.”
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At WPI, students’ efforts have so far achieved a 2% raise for teaching assistants, and the university formed a committee to gather feedback on graduate students’ concerns, but Scarponi said those changes are not enough.
“We could talk to you all day about what we would like you to do, but we need some direct democracy here,” he said. “We need a mechanism to hold everybody to account on policy decisions and have something a little more binding than a group that just talks to a couple of deans every so often.”
Westgard-Cruice said that while his union is hoping to achieve better working conditions for its members, those changes will also benefit Clark and the community as a whole.
“It’s also clear that the university is suffering in terms of maintaining the liveliness of several programs as well,” he said. “The reality is that many of the administrators are just not in touch with this at all. They don’t really realize that we are the lifeblood of many of these departments, and that many world-renowned professors that we happily work with will not be able to continue to do the groundbreaking research on issues of climate change, social psychology, physics and so on without us.”