From the Stanford Graduate Employees Union (SGWU): Our proposed platform

Immediately, after a few years of graduate pupil organizing, Stanford graduate employees will lastly get the prospect to hitch a lot of our peer establishments and unionize. It is a nice day to be a graduate pupil at Stanford. Though we’ve got talked to a lot of you face-to-face, you should still moderately ask: what does the Stanford Graduate Employees Union stand for? How will my wants and issues be addressed by becoming a member of a union? In response to those glorious questions, we share our platform under and invite you to go to our union web site right here or attend a union info session on April 6 at 6:30 p.m. in EVGR B 144. These are solely among the issues for which we stand; this listing will solely proceed to evolve because the union grows to listen to and characterize each graduate employee on campus.

Our proposed platform

As Stanford graduate employees, we all know that Stanford works as a result of we do. We conduct analysis and instructing integral to the College’s operation, popularity, and mission. We additionally know, nevertheless, that as graduate employees nearly all of us are compelled to navigate unjust working circumstances in some type throughout our tutorial careers at Stanford.

SGWU is preventing for a union as a result of the issues we face as graduate employees are solvable. We imagine that the power to interact in collective bargaining with the College administration — in different phrases, participation within the decision-making that impacts us — will assist us construct a Stanford the place all graduate employees can thrive.

Our proposed platform, which consists of 5 core factors, emerged from the preliminary outcomes of the Institutional Analysis & Determination Help (IR&DS) Bills Survey (AY 2022-23), the Graduate Pupil Council (GSC) Summer season Affordability Survey and Invoice on Affordability (October 2022), the GSC petition (February 2023), the outcomes of the IR&DS Ph.D. Exit Survey, the IDEAL Survey, and hundreds of conversations between employees over current years. This proposed platform, impressed by the positive factors of different graduate employee unions, is simply a place to begin. Stanford’s graduate employees will democratically determine what to combat for via a bargaining survey disseminated earlier than contract negotiations.

In the end, by taking part on this course of, graduate employees acquire democratic decision-making energy in two methods: We construct a union that’s by us and for us, wherein every graduate employee has a voice, and we safe the power to demand higher equity, transparency, and democracy within the College operations that affect almost each facet of our lives.

SGWU will combat for:

1. Reasonably priced dwelling circumstances for all graduate employees.
2. Complete advantages for all graduate employees and their dependents.
3. Protected and wholesome workplaces freed from energy abuse, harassment, and discrimination.
4. Improved assist for worldwide and immigrant graduate employees.
5. Democratic decision-making energy and transparency.

Reasonably priced dwelling circumstances for all graduate employees

Because the GSC has made clear time and time once more, Stanford graduate employees are, and have been for a while, topic to an acute affordability disaster. This disaster disproportionately impacts worldwide and immigrant employees, mother and father, first-generation college students, and employees from low-income backgrounds. 

The College not too long ago introduced that its AY 2023-24 minimal assistantship stipend will likely be $50,616. This determine falls considerably under the “Very Low Revenue Restrict” of $59,000 for a 1-person family in Santa Clara County established by the U.S. Division of Housing and City Improvement (HUD) in FY 2022.* This would be the third consecutive 12 months that our salaries haven’t stored tempo with inflation — in different phrases, our actual wages have gone down every year for the final three years. In the meantime, Stanford’s value of dwelling calculations present that in AY 2023-24, roughly 48% of our stipends will go to hire; we graduate employees know that, for many people, this determine is considerably greater.** This share has elevated steadily during the last decade: In 2013, it was simply over 40%.

Stanford is our employer and infrequently our landlord. We stay in an space with one of many highest prices of dwelling within the nation, and the maths simply isn’t that difficult. We’d like a dwelling wage, annual raises that match the rising value of housing and inflation charges, public transportation and parking subsidies, an enlargement of Marguerite shuttle routes and schedules, the elimination of graduate employee charges, and housing that’s really inexpensive. We suggest that Stanford cut back rents charged by Residential and Eating Enterprises (R&DE), as graduate housing specifically is sponsored by taxpayers through property tax waivers.

We emphasize that the wants of graduate employees and college are sometimes mutually aligned. We advocate for the elimination or discount of graduate tuition, a lower in overhead prices, and the elimination of Terminal Commencement Registration (TGR) tuition. By minimizing the schooling charges charged to principal investigators, exterior grants will be capable of assist elevated labor and materials prices.

A dwelling wage is a crucial step on the trail to attaining racial and class-based fairness, that are persistently skewed in lots of Stanford doctoral packages.

* Because the GSC has identified, the margin between Stanford’s minimal assistantship stipend and the area’s “Very Low Revenue Restrict” as stipulated by HUD far outpaces the corresponding margins for Stanford’s peer establishments.

**  The federal authorities defines a family as “hire burdened” when greater than 30% of its earnings goes to hire and as “severely hire burdened” when greater than 50% of its earnings goes to hire.

Complete advantages for all graduate employees and their dependents

A couple of in three respondents to the IR&DS Bills Survey reported that that they had foregone medical, dental, or imaginative and prescient care as a result of they may not afford it. Many people have had the expertise of getting our requests for reimbursement for medical bills from the Emergency Grant-in-Help fund rejected arbitrarily, or of struggling to acquire sufficient psychological healthcare. In the meantime, the Graduate Household Grant fund gives every family with as much as $20,000 in assist, regardless that, because the GSC notes, the price of childcare alone in our space ranges from $20,400 to $28,880. These circumstances render graduate work and tutorial professions considerably much less accessible to all of us, and particularly to these with power sicknesses and disabilities. There’s presently no recognition of rights for graduate employees with disabilities as mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Act (ADA), and Workplace of Accessible Training (OAE) coverage modifications are tough to trace.

The College should present full dental and imaginative and prescient protection, develop psychological healthcare choices, improve the variety of psychological healthcare employees at Counseling and Psychological Companies (CAPS) so that each graduate employee has entry to a therapist they belief, provide medical insurance for dependents at no extra value, get rid of the Vaden Well being Payment, grant not less than one quarter of paid medical depart with assured placement in housing, and permit graduate employees to enroll in a retirement plan.

Furthermore, we want parental depart for graduate employees, lactation rooms, and entry to sponsored youngster and elder care. Complete advantages have been proven to contribute to gender inclusion and fairness, that are persistently skewed in lots of Stanford doctoral packages.

Protected and wholesome workplaces freed from energy abuse, harassment, and discrimination

The outcomes of the IDEAL Survey demonstrated that energy abuse, harassment, and discrimination are rampant at Stanford — and that these points are magnified for these of us who maintain a number of marginalized identities. All too typically, we’re left with few to no good choices for resolving conditions that impede our potential to do our work and trigger us bodily and psychological hurt, as institutional channels for reporting are sometimes designed to guard the College as an alternative of us. Consequently, our experiences finish in silencing, intimidation, and retaliation relatively than justice, transformation, and therapeutic.

We’d like a good, environment friendly, and efficient grievance process via which graduate employees can select to resolve energy abuse, harassment, discrimination, and retaliation points with the assist of a union advocate; a impartial, third-party arbiter in instances wherein the graduate employee and union advocate are unable to return to an settlement with the College; union illustration in disciplinary proceedings; clear, clear requirements for disciplinary proceedings themselves; and collectively negotiated contingency plans for graduate employees when a supervisor is publicly accused of abuse. As well as, Stanford should enhance its insurance policies round race, gender, and incapacity justice, and we should always have a say within the growth of those insurance policies.

We’ll combat for enhancements to our work circumstances, together with the utmost analysis and instructing load that may be required of graduate employees by their supervisors, skilled suggestions and growth, and efficiency analysis. Stanford Ph.D. college students rank the supply of college, program construction and necessities, and work commitments as the highest three most vital obstacles to tutorial progress. We’d like skilled office requirements to treatment these issues.

Improved assist for worldwide and immigrant graduate employees

Worldwide and immigrant college students represent a good portion of the graduate employee physique, but these of us who are usually not U.S. residents face important logistical and monetary obstacles that intrude with our work each day.

We’ll combat for reimbursements for visa charges, a grievance process for graduate employees who’ve been unjustly terminated and concern deportation, improved authorized sources in addition to tax and immigration counseling for worldwide and immigrant employees and their dependents, paid depart for immigration hearings and international elections, flexibility for employees returning to their residence nation to go to family members or renew visas, strengthened sources for employees navigating tradition shock and an absence of neighborhood, and the College’s promise to not permit entry or present info to governmental businesses about graduate employees for the needs of detention or deportation primarily based on immigration standing.

Democratic decision-making energy and transparency

Even if the analysis and instructing we offer are indispensable to Stanford, we train little energy in Stanford’s decision-making processes. The GSC helps unionization as a result of its suggestions are persistently dismissed and ignored, and are on no account binding for directors. Because the GSC famous in its current petition, this 12 months the Workplace of the Vice Provost for Graduate Training promised to seek the advice of the GSC earlier than setting the minimal graduate assistantship stipend for AY 2023-24, solely to subsequent contact the GSC 48 hours after publicly saying that stipend.

Stanford should assure graduate employee illustration in any respect ranges of the College, together with seats on the complete Board of Trustees. Graduate employees should maintain voting energy on the problems that have an effect on them, which embrace the whole lot starting from graduate housing to the College’s investments to campus security coverage.

Tania Flores, Gabriela Basel, Hanon McShea and the Stanford Graduate Employees Union

Tania Flores is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures. Her analysis focuses on race, gender, and empire in fashionable Spanish cultural manufacturing. She was born in Cuernavaca, México and raised in northern California.

Gabriela Basel is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Chemical Engineering. She research illness development simulations for healthcare decision-making.

Hanon McShea is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Earth System Science. Hanon research the dynamics of protein evolution on lengthy timescales, notably enzymes concerned within the biosynthesis of organic membranes.