After over a year and a half of organizing among Syracuse's graduate student body, Syracuse Graduate Employees United overwhelmingly voted to unionize on Tuesday (April 4), joining Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The union covers 1,124 of Syracuse's graduate students.
The victory of Syracuse Graduate Employees United comes among a wave of similar graduate worker unionization efforts in the United States; at least a half a dozen overwhelming union victories have occurred in this space just in the past few months and more are certainly to come. These victories are broadly motivated by the same issues: a glaring lack of pay for an overwhelming amount of work, inconsistent or part-time employment, lack of benefits and protections for such workers, growing cost of living, and overall dissatisfaction with campus leadership.
The situation at Syracuse is stereotypical in this regard, with union organizers reporting:
Whereas a 12-month living wage for Syracuse is $32,000, grads working full-time earn, around $22,000 on average Hundreds of grads also endure part-time employment, earning as little as $14 per hour. Meanwhile, our rent and health insurance premiums rise year after year while we lack basic protections from overwork, harassment, and discrimination.
Reporting by local news outlet Syracuse.com further noted: "While students only get paid for 20 hours of work a week, some have reported working double that."
According to Daily Orange, the university's newspaper, Syracuse recently committed to substantial–although still incredibly insufficient–increases in the minimum allowable pay for graduate workers, no doubt in an effort to choke the momentum of the unionization effort.
The new union hopes to begin collective bargaining with the university during Fall semester of this year; in the interim between then and now, they are working to solicit feedback and priorities on what the newly-unionized graduate student body needs. Further pay increases are likely to be a key union demand during the process.