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After overhearing a meeting at Eggers Café between graduate students about labor concerns in September, Megan Cooper, a third-year undergraduate student at Syracuse University, said she felt she needed to be a part of the conversation.

“This is a human rights, workers’ rights issue that we are directly impacted by as undergrad students,” Cooper said.

With assistance from the Syracuse Graduate Employee Union, Cooper formed the Undergraduate Labor Organization in November 2022 to increase support for workers and labor movements on campus. The organization is currently focused on supporting SGEU and its efforts to be officially recognized as a union, Cooper said.

ULO also helped plan Monday’s Teach-in Event, where SGEU members gave a presentation to educate students on the process of forming the union and the campaign’s history, as well as testimonials about their experiences as SU graduate employees.

After completing the initial steps of the union establishment process, SGEU is currently in the process of gaining more support in preparation for requesting official recognition from SU. If SU does not voluntarily recognize SGEU, the union will hold an election with the National Labor Relations Board, in which it would need a simple majority to win.

Cooper emphasized the importance of the campus community understanding the impact of graduate student working conditions on undergraduate students. SU currently offers over 1,200 graduate assistantship positions where graduate students can serve as teaching or research assistants. However, these positions place graduate students struggling with poor working conditions into classrooms to teach undergraduates, impacting learning conditions for students.

“There’s a lot of people that have heard now that grad student workers are having a union push, or they’ve seen pictures of people on the Hendricks steps,” Cooper said. “But I think what’s not realized by a lot of undergrads still is that the TAs that teach us are not making a living wage.”

Since the launch of SGEU’s campaign on Jan. 17, ULO members have worked directly with graduate students to determine ways to best support the union. Cooper said ULO has focused on the petitioning process to gain signatures and attending SGEU events.

Alana Kaufman, an undergraduate student at SU who co-founded ULO, spoke at the launch event about her intention to work in solidarity with SGEU. She referenced SGEU members who had been her TAs, and shared the ways they helped spark her academic passion for geography.

“As an undergraduate, I understand how tied my success and my education are to the work of the TAs and the other graduate student workers who stand here with me,” Kaufman said. I call on us undergraduates to finally speak up for graduate student workers who have done so much for us, not just of course because workers deserve a living wage, (but also) because any improvement to their life directly translates to an improvement in our education.”

In efforts to show this support outwardly, some undergraduates are signing SGEU’s petition calling for voluntary recognition.

“With regards to the petitioning process, I think that’s been the most productive part of the campaign so far,” said Max Farrar, an SU undergraduate and a member of ULO. “It’s been probably the bulk of the on-the-ground work that we do, aside from going to the meetings and stuff.”

ULO is also working to form a “reciprocal” relationship between undergraduate and graduate students, Cooper said.

“We’ve also been working with them for a while on just thinking about how we can reach out to undergraduates on campus and what undergraduate support looks like, as well as fielding these ideas for how SGEU would impact undergraduate students,” Cooper said.

Farrar said it’s been “great” to see the SU student body’s sympathy and support for SGEU. ULO will host its next meeting on Tuesday evening in Marshall Square Mall, she said.

“The graduate student workers, after all, are our TAs, so we have pretty direct contact with them on a frequent basis, even more so than a lot of professors most of the time,” Farrar said.

Published on January 26, 2023 at 12:52 am

Contact Kendall: kaluther@syr.edu