UPDATED: Feb. 7, 2019 at 1:45 a.m.

Syracuse University’s Graduate Student Organization is gathering statistics on graduate employees’ wages, employment benefits and working conditions to evaluate graduate employment at SU.

The GSO’s Employment Issues Committee plans to draft a new survey this week to collect information on employment and wage. Last semester, the committee concluded that graduate students at SU don’t make a living wage.

Anthony Walker, a GSO Senator on the committee, said he wants to send the new survey to all SU graduate students so those who are not employed can say whether they choose not to have a job or if they’re seeking employment.  The committee has not decided who the survey will be sent to, he said.

GSO President Jack Wilson said the employment survey will be part of a more comprehensive survey sent to all graduate students. It will cover questions about wage, working hours, health care, international student life, living with a family, employment and other topics, he said.

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Syracuse Graduate Employees United, a group of SU graduate student employees advocating for better employee benefits and rights, was excluded from viewing raw data from the survey. The Senate voted to exclude SGEU due to confidentiality concerns.

Walker, who is also a member of SGEU, said the two groups butted heads last year when GSO voted to switch health care plans for graduate students. He said he worries that the survey may not be drafted if the Senate finds too many complications in the planning procedure.

Walker joined SGEU before being elected to GSO.  He became a member of GSO’s Employment Issues Committee to see if both groups would come together to cooperate.

When a survey was sent to all graduate students in April 2017, the Senate found issues with employees’ pay ranges and employment, Walker said. The Senate wanted to find a way to bring the results to SU and have the university release the data, he added.

The wage report survey last semester showed that graduate employees do not make a living wage, according to a calculator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Wilson said GSO has known for years that there have been student employee wage issues. The Senate discussed wage issues in 2013, but those conversations were overshadowed in following years by other matters such as housing safety and switching the health insurance plan, he said.

Graduate students work as teaching, instructional, graduate and research assistantships or under a fellowship. Pay fluctuates between titles and academic departments.

Walker was offered four semesters of assistantship in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs’ Geographic Information Systems program. He said his salary is $19,850 before taxes, and he gets a $4,250 award for summer masters research.

He considers himself a minority among graduate students because he has never been financially strained from undergraduate debt. Walker also said he is paid on the higher end of the spectrum of graduate student wages.

Seok Yong, a teaching assistant in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, is a member of SGEU’s organizing committee.

For the first two years of Yong’s studies, she could not save enough money to travel home to Malaysia during the winter and summer breaks, she said.

Yong said the main issue with graduate student labor on campus is getting “full support from the university” rather than just increasing wages.

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She also said GSO and SGEU should work together.

If SU recognizes SGEU as a union, the group would have the right to collectively bargain with the university over graduate student wages, health care and other issues.

“We need more coordination than anything.” she said. “I think SGEU and GSO can come together to make change together. GSO is a student body, but SGEU has the power to negotiate.”

CLARIFICATION: In a previous version of this post, Syracuse Graduate Employees Unite was said to be excluded from seeing the results of the survey. They are actually just excluded from seeing the raw data. 

Published on February 5, 2019 at 11:15 pm

Contact Richard: rjchang@syr.edu | @RichardJChang1