USC and the Graduate Student Workers Organizing Committee (GSWOC) reached a tentative agreement Sunday, according to GSWOC’s Instagram. Starting in August 2024, the deal will last three and a half years and includes provisions regarding minimum wage and workplace protections.
“At the final hour, the USC administration made major concessions on Wages and Nondiscrimination to avert a strike and reach a deal on a historic and industry-setting first contract for Graduate Student Workers,” GSWOC said in its statement on Instagram.
According to a GSWOC email sent on Sunday, workers will receive a 24.8% increase in their minimum wage over four years. This is the result of an 18.9% hike agreed upon in the contract plus the 5% that USC promised before the graduate student workers unionized in February. Additionally, the agreement guarantees a 12% raise of the USC Graduate School stipend from $35,700 to $40,000. Workers will also receive one semester of guaranteed parental leave, one semester of health leave, five annual sick days and five days of bereavement leave.
The agreement also gives protection against workplace discrimination in accordance with university policy. Workers will have a formal method of reporting grievances through the Equity, Equal Opportunity, and Title IX Office and GSWOC will have oversight on any workplace complaints. USC will also ensure that graduate student workers will have easy access to all-gender bathrooms and a fund of $650,000 to assist with health care expenses.
In a win for international students, USC will also provide a legal fund for graduate students who lose their visa status in the United States.
“The tentative contract we have agreed to provides graduate students with an industry-leading range of benefits and protections that reaffirm the university’s commitment to graduate education and ensures that they have access to one of the best funding packages in the country,” said the dean of the USC Graduate School Andrew McConnell Stott in a statement Monday.
Stott shared his opinion on the agreement in an interview with Annenberg Media.
“I’m really pleased that we were able to reach such a great contract at this point in the semester,”
Stott said. “We listened to their priorities. We took them really seriously and we made substantive offers on every priority that they told us that they had.”
Stott is expecting this union contract to continue to support graduate students and said that they will meet again in four years to plan for the next contract.
GSWOC was set to strike starting on Tuesday, a move that would have affected teacher’s assistants, assistant lecturers, researchers assistants and other roles within the graduate student workplace during the final week of classes and the final exam period. There will not be any disruptions in final exams or assessments of undergraduate students, as the strike has been canceled, according to Stott. Union members will vote to ratify the contract from December 4 to December 6, according to the USC Graduate School.