The Tartan

By Christopher Lessler

On Tuesday March 19 at 5:30 p.m., around 45 individuals entered Porter Hall 100 to discuss how to improve the working conditions of academic workers. They discussed the situations of undergraduate and graduate research assistants and TAs, as well as post-docs.

The organizers’ goals are a $50,000 minimum stipend for graduate students, an $80,000 minimum stipend for post-docs, and a $25 per hour minimum wage for hourly academic workers. They also seek cost-of- living adjustments, independent arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination, and improved support for international graduate students’ visas. Their current goal is to get the attention of academic workers and build wide support.

There are about 20 to 30 Ph.D. students, postdocs, masters, and undergrads in the organizing committee meeting weekly. Organizers at the meeting discussed recent wins for academic workers at other universities, including unions negotiating $45,000 minimum stipends for graduate workers at Northwestern and the University of Chicago.

Organizers also debriefed about updates at Carnegie Mellon, including a recent raise in the minimum stipend for doctoral students up to $30,000, and a higher minimum of $36,000 for the Mellon College of Science. However, organizers also said that the school is not providing guaranteed cost of living pay increases, and that a goal of the university making these improvements is to cut organizing momentum early.

Multiple attendees discussed their experiences transferring between graduate programs at Carnegie Mellon and being surprised by how the programs they transferred into are massively underfunded compared to those they transferred out of.

One organizer, post-doctoral fellow Amzi Jeffs, said that when he came to Carnegie Mellon, he was surprised by his lack of school-paid health insurance and bus pass during his first year. In his case, Carnegie Mellon declined to pay for these items because he was paid by the National Science Foundation, the main grant-funding agency for mathematics research, meaning he had to independently obtain health insurance. He was also surprised by how the school doesn’t provide visa support like STEM OPT extensions.

“That’s something that most major institutions would do,” Jeffs said. He explained that the current group of academic workers advocating for increased compensation and better working conditions started from a petition last fall to extend the school’s $1,500 inflation relief payments to all workers, not just faculty and non-unionized staff.

“We got a really good response from everybody on campus: faculty, undergrads, graduate students, workers,” Jeffs said. “We delivered 1,000 signatures to Provost Garrett at the end of October.” The administration responded saying they would not extend the payments to all Carnegie Mellon workers.

“And I think the other thing that made us decide to take action that we were excited about was all of the organizing that’s happening on other campuses around the country,” Jeffs added. Many schools across the country now have academic worker unions, including MIT, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University.

Jeffs told The Tartan he could “say I was surprised by how quickly and supportively people responded but honestly, I wasn’t, given how desperate things are for a lot of folks. I think the response we’ve gotten has been really encouraging.”

Multiple organizers said they felt Carnegie Mellon is falling behind in competitiveness compared to peer institutions.

“The obvious thing is, we wouldn’t like that to happen,” said Wojciech Nawrocki, another organizer. He said he is aware of stories of graduate students not being able to afford rent or groceries, which he said is in part caused by COVID-19 and associated inflation.

Multiple organizers also talked about how they are communicating with groups of academic workers at other universities. “We are both supportive of them; they are supportive of us,” said Nawrocki. “In the end, we’re all in the same boat, trying to do good research, trying to expand the general body of knowledge.”

Nawrocki also said most academic workers whom the group has talked to are supportive, although this does not include absolutely everyone.

Another organizer, Jess Vinskus, said she began to consider being involved in efforts for academic workers to advocate for themselves after seeing the campaign for $1,500 inflation relief payments to be extended to academic workers. After going to an organizing meeting in November 2023, Vinskus said she decided to become involved as an organizer.

“I think almost every Ph.D. student will tell you that they struggle with money, even in a small way,” said Vinskus. “I work in Mellon College of Science, and we get paid, I think, ‘Okay, as far as it goes to the university,’ but I still live paycheck to paycheck.”

Vinskus said she is seeing support from students of all backgrounds. “I think some people who are a little bit more well off are like, they’re hanging out, they’re chilling, and then they hear about other people’s struggles that they may not have thought about,” said Vinskus. “And they realize, oh, no, we should fight for something because not everyone has it as good as I do.”

Vinskus also said she has been having a lot of conversations with other academic workers about current working conditions and compensation, saying that “people are a little bit fed up with the way that they’re treated. And so talking to them is really easy, because they just open up about the struggles they’re having.”

Although organizers are hoping to make demands from the university to improve compensation and working conditions for academic workers, Vinskus said this doesn’t have to come at the university’s detriment.

“I think that we are on the same side as the administration because I think that having these benefits that we are asking for would help increase the image of CMU for prospective students and workers,” Vinskus said.

“Other universities are increasing pay and increasing benefits, and so we want that for ourselves, obviously, but I feel like [for] the university it would make sense for them to want that too, because it would make it a much more attractive place to work.”