In negotiations dating back to mid-April, USC’s graduate student workers union has been advocating for higher wages and better benefits for graduate student workers, who commonly work as teaching and research assistants.
Having reached tentative agreements for less than half of the issues concerning members, the union opened a strike authorization vote at 7 a.m. on Tuesday. Voting will remain open through Thursday.
If the authorization receives two-thirds approval votes, the union will be able to decide to strike if the committee feels it is necessary.
“Striking is very much, from the graduate student workers perspective, a last resort,” said Jackie Johnson, a doctoral candidate on the union bargaining committee. “It’s something that we’d have to be pushed into, based on the university delaying proposals or not getting counter offers that meet graduate student needs.”
From the university’s perspective, USC is “doing everything we can to avert a strike,” said Andrew Stott, dean of USC Graduate School. “A strike will be disruptive to everybody; it will be divisive to the community.”
According to Stott, there are more than 2,500 graduate student workers in the union bargaining unit, a third of which are teaching assistants (TAs) and two-thirds of which are research assistants (RAs). Stott said graduate student workers represent around 5% of the student body, collectively.
Of the 11,000 sections of class offered at USC per semester, TAs support about 1,300 sections, Stott said.
The most recent proposal addressing key issues on the table — like wages, health care and childcare support — was handed over by USC administration on Monday evening.
The document is the third “economic package” the university has pitched to the union, which formed in February of this year after members of the Graduate Student Workers Organizing Committee (GSWOC) reached out to the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), forming GSWOC-UAW.
Monday’s economic package proposal makes note of a 5% increase in wages provided in July for the 2023-24 academic year. The current stipend therefore stands at $35,700, Stott said. The proposal lays out wage increases of 2 to 2.5% over the next three years.
Following this model, graduate student workers would earn just over $38,000 by the fall of 2026. This is a substantially lower wage than the GSWOC-UAW’s first ask in August, which requested that first-year student workers be paid $50,000, the first rung on a ladder culminating in fifth-year student workers receiving a stipend of $70,000.
According to data compiled by GSWOC-UAW, USC’s stipend, which the university identifies as being “among the most competitive in the nation,” is lower than that offered at UCLA, Princeton, Columbia and Stanford, which tops the list at over $51,000.
“While the university did give us a wage [increase] after we unionized for this school year, people are still finding it hard to live in an expensive city like Los Angeles,” said Johnson, a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at the USC Cinematic Arts school.
Johnson has been a student at USC since before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Since then, she said “there’s been little evolution.” Many members of the union feel that the wage increases — both those already granted and those proposed by the university moving forward — are not high enough to reflect the rising cost of inflation.
In an email distributed to graduate student workers, Wes Wise, a third-year doctoral student studying mathematics and member of union’s bargaining committee, called the university’s second economic package proposal “below inflation,” amounting to a “0% additional raise.”
The university wants to ensure their “economic package is taken as a whole,” rather than focusing on stipends alone, Stott said. In addition to their stipends, students receive health care, dental care, vision care, remission of all mandatory fees, and “free tuition of up to $66,640 a year,” he said.
“Remember, these are students first and foremost,” Stott said. “They apply to USC to pursue a program of study, not to come and take a job as a teaching assistant or research assistant.”
Also on the table is childcare support for graduate student workers with children. In Monday’s economic package, the university proposed that workers be able to apply for a subsidy of up to “$1,800 per semester for each child under the age of six,” with the money coming out of a fund with a maximum annual cap of $250,000.
“Having access to childcare, and being able to afford it, is a key part of being able to do your work as a graduate student worker,” Johnson said.
Fearing that parents will “have to fight each other until the pot of money runs out,” the union is advocating for a reimbursement model rather than a capped fund, she said.
More successful negotiations surrounding grievance and arbitration have led to a tentative agreement reached in July. Graduate student workers “don’t have faith in the internal process,” Johnson said about the current abuse, harassment and discrimination procedures within USC, like the Title IX office.
Under the tentative agreement, strict timelines would be introduced. Currently, students with grievances “might even graduate before they reach a resolution,” Johnson said. Both the university and the union would appoint independent arbitrators, so the complaint wouldn’t be heard solely in-house.
Last year, graduate student workers at University of California schools held a strike that lasted for five weeks. The absence of graduate student workers was felt across all 10 campuses, with classes and grading heavily disrupted, the L.A. Times reported.
If the union authorizes — and declares — a strike, USC has a plan in place to ensure continuity of education, Stott said. As online systems like Blackboard belong to the university, faculty will retain access to grading software even if teaching assistants go on strike.
Further, he said discussion sections may be able to happen on Zoom, so faculty can run them.
Stott also said that the university is prepared to modify final exams or other assessments “in any way that’s necessary” to make sure students can get their final results, have their financial aid renewed or even graduate.
But Johnson said the university functions largely because of the graduate student workers.
“I have had a positive experience so far at USC,” Johnson said. “And it is actually because of that that I am invested in making this place a better place to work and study.”