For two years, more than 1500 U of R grad workers have been coming together to form a union. We perform essential teaching and research duties and earn as little as $15k/year. In December, we reached an agreement with the U of R ensuring a pathway to form their union. But once Trump was elected, the U of R administration abruptly announced they were no longer interested in recognizing the agreement and that they intended to block grad workers from having the right to organize.
The Graduate Labor Union (GLU) at the University of Rochester (UR) is fighting to form a graduate worker union for PhDs in AS&E, Eastman, Strong, SMD, Warner, and Simon. By uniting to form a labor union, we can fight for our collective well-being and join the tens of thousands of graduate workers who are already organized across the country. Just like them, we can win protections against racism, sexism, bullying, harassment, etc.; stronger international student support; better health benefits; parental support; huge pay raises; and so much more.
I am an international student, will I be retaliated against being involved with unionization?
No. Under the National Labor Relations Act, international graduate workers, regardless of immigration status, have the same rights regarding unions as domestic graduate workers. Retaliation is illegal. For more details, feel free to read some information (here and here) from the National Labor Relations Board, which is an Agency run by the United States Federal Government.
In addition, to our knowledge, no international graduate workers have ever been retaliated against for organizing their workplace.
Is a union an outside group coming in and representing us?
It is not. A union is a democratic organization of all us graduate workers which means that we make all our decisions for ourselves. We are the ones that will vote to establish a union. We are the ones that will vote for a bargaining committee. We are the ones that will vote on our contracts. We are the ones that will vote for our leadership.
While we are working with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), we still will run our union democratically and set our own priorities and strategies. Joining SEIU just gives us access to more resources like paid organizers and increases our strength since over 1500 workers at UR are already affiliated with SEIU.