"Notes From the TUGSA Picket Line" (Temple University)

 On the Higher Education Labor United (HELU) blog:

Notes from the TUGSA Picket Line – Higher Education Labor United (higheredlaborunited.org)

Our Demands

• A Living Wage

  Current average pay for graduate employees is $19,500 a year. Our proposed base-wage of $32,800 is designed to bring graduate employee pay in line with living costs in Philadelphia based on the MIT Living Wage Calculator, as of January 2021 when negotiations began. Other Universities in the area like Penn have already acknowledged this need, raising their graduate pay to $38,000. Graduate employees should be able to live in the city where they work. 

• Healthcare for Dependents and Families

  The cost of adding dependents to graduate employee healthcare plans are prohibitively expensive. The cost of adding just one dependent to a plan for a year is almost a third of the total annual salary of graduate employees. Adding two or three dependents amounts to roughly 58% and 86% of the annual salary. 

• Longer Parental and Bereavement Leave

  Despite graduate school being a time in life when many people want to start families and Temple marketing itself as an institution of accessibility, Temple’s policies make this impossible. Temple currently provides only 5 days of parental leave. 

• Better Working Conditions

  It’s one of our most basic rights as a union to negotiate over the terms of our workload, yet the administration refuses to engage at all with our proposals that would help address widespread overwork and mismanagement of contracts and work assignments. Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions, and when our conditions are substandard, our students suffer. 

STRIKE - Learn More — Temple University Graduate Students' Association (tugsa.org)