About 3,400 graduate student workers at the University of Southern California (USC) filed a petition to form a union with the National Labor Relations Board.
“Graduate student workers across all departments power teaching and research at USC,” the statement read. “By joining the wave of academic organizing in higher education, they are seeking to raise the bar for academic workers everywhere.”
The group has also joined United Auto Workers (UAW), a national labor union representing 75,000 higher education workers—including the 48,000 University of California academic workers who launched the largest academic strike in history last month.
Most dues go to a “Strike and Defense Fund” to support union members who are not receiving pay while on strike, according to the website. Twenty-eight percent of dues go to a local union fund to recruit and educate new members and to negotiate contracts, and another 25 percent goes to UAW’s national fund.
However, the group will not charge dues until it has gone through the bargaining process and voted to approve its first contract.
Just before filing the petition, the group’s leaders also sent a letter signed by hundreds of graduate student workers to USC Provost Charles Zukoski and Senior Vice President Felicia A. Washington to inform them of their decision to unionize.
Neither Zukoski nor Washington were immediately available for comment.
USC graduate workers were partly inspired to unionize by the recent UC strikes, according to group member Maggie Davis, a teaching assistant in USC’s Sociology Department.
“We have seen what our peers at the University of California and elsewhere have been able to accomplish through unionization,” said Davis in a statement. “We are forming a union so we can have a powerful voice and a seat at the table to work with the administration to create change here at USC.”
University of California (UC) postdoctoral scholars and researchers resumed work this week after ratifying a labor contract over the weekend, but 36,000 graduate student workers continue to strike.
Last month, 48,000 researchers and student employees across all 10 UC campuses launched a strike, demanding, in part, pay raises due to cost-of-living increases.
UC officials struck a tentative deal with the postdoctoral scholars and researchers Nov. 29, who have said they would not return to work until their contracts were ratified and out of solidarity with the remaining graduate students.
According to United Auto Workers, the agreement for postdoctoral scholars includes up to a 23 percent salary increase by October 2023, up to $2,500 in annual childcare reimbursement with annual $100 increases over the next three years, two-year initial appointments, and a new paid leave program with 100 percent pay for up to eight weeks.
The tentative agreement for academic researchers includes a pay raise of 4.5 percent for the first year, 3.5 percent in the second, third, and fourth years, and 4 percent in the fifth year; eight weeks of 100 percent paid family leave; increased bereavement leave; and a new system to address workplace conduct and conflict resolution.
The contracts will be in effect through Sept. 30, 2027.
