Graduate students working at Temple University are going on strike to as many
movements are raised,
their wages get better quality of life, better health care.
In response, the university is canceling our healthcare and
charging them thousands of dollars.
This is unprecedented.
We wanna give you all the details.
So on Wednesday just two days ago,
some members of the union have been on strike since January 31st.
It's not that long standing received an email from the university saying actually.
Why don't we bring it up and
you can see the actual email that was sent out as a result of your participation in
the TUGSA strike, your tuition remission has been removed for the spring semester.
You now owe the full balance listed in TU pay, which is due by Thursday March 9th.
If you're balance is not paid in full by the due date, you will be assessed a $100
late payment fee and a financial hold will be placed on your student account.
This hold will prevent future registration.
What are the students who received this email Madison Ingram responded with lol,
for my convenience.
Because of course it says for your convenience,
you can make payment online by clicking to you pay student account.
Yeah, very convenient to be forced to pay up immediately for
the entirety of the thing because you don't like that.
They are providing an example for their students perhaps of the power of labor and
how it needs to fight for its own interests in any event.
They wouldn't strike back on January 31st after an impasse in negotiations over
benefits and pay.
Currently, graduate students who work as TA's are RA's and
graduate assistants receive less than $20,000 per year in compensation.
Graduate workers want the university to raise that to 32,500.
The cost of living in Philadelphia is nearly, sorry, 37,000.
So it wouldn't even match that even after the rays they're asking for.
They also, by the way want better health care coverage for workers dependence.
It's so bad that if they have to cover their dependence on their health care
plans, they can end up spending somewhere between 30 to 86% of their income
on insurance premiums for their dependence.
Obviously that's not sustainable, not even remotely.
And there are graduate students in similar positions as TAs, R As.
And all of that in universities, not that far away making significantly more money.
So there's a precedent in the area for their demands.
David, what do you think about this?
>> This is terrible for Temple University.
I mean, he used to have a pretty good reputation as a great academic
institution.
Undergraduate and graduate, but the idea that a graduate student would be having to
survive doing their graduate studies doing their TA work,
helping to teach classes on $20,000.
That's insane.
You cannot have a family, you can't have kids if you're in graduate school.
And once upon a time I was a kid, my parents were in graduate school and
they had me and my brothers.
And back then, 50 some years ago it was actually a pretty decent life if you
were in graduate school.
But our society has decided to hell with universities,
to hell with graduate students, we don't care.
And as a result their salaries have never kept up even with inflation.
And now living as a graduate student means living in poverty literally and
that's who we want our students to be learning from.
That's insanity.
>> Yeah, I mean, just imagine, John getting full time paid for full time work.
That's a novel concept.
And I think that the most important part of this to me,
especially as it pertains to the university system that we have in America.
Where these fools jack up the prices every single year because they know the costs
will be underwritten by the federal government in the form of student loans.
So they're all richer than ever.
And so this idea that they can't afford to pay the people who help
basically undergird the education system at any given school is absurd.
And again, our government is subsidizing this like kids think it's a given
that they should take out these exorbitant loans to go to these universities.
And they get that money right away and people have to pay it back later.
So this idea that a university, again, they're richer than ever,
the costs have skyrocketed in the past decades.
The cost of college, just the idea that they're underpaying anybody,
much less graduate assistance.
It's absurd.
>> Yeah, 100%.
In this case I can speak with some experience.
I was a graduate student at the University of Texas at
Austin in the government department and I taught classes.
I gave lectures, I did office hours, I proctor exams,
I ran an experimental media lab, I assisted professors in research programs.
I tutored athletes.
I probably did other stuff that I'm not even remembering.
It was pretty important I think.
And thankfully at least as of then I can't speak to the condition at UT right now.
They did allow you to live, I mean, it wasn't like a fabulous life.
I was constantly worried about growing broke but they covered your tuition.
They provided a stipend and all that because they knew that the system would
grind to a halt if they didn't have those graduate student workers.
And by the way, if they had not done that, if the benefits had been 20% worse,
I wouldn't have been able to go.
And the thing is I understand for regular people,
let alone those who have have had their mind poisoned against higher education.
By the right wing you might think well boo hoo for the graduate students there in
a doctoral program that's so removed for my life and in many ways perhaps it is.
But the people who are doing all of those roles, the ones I just listed before,
they're the ones who are in the future are gonna be the professors.
They're gonna be the scholars, they're gonna be the ones hopefully coming up with
new stuff for people to continue to learn.
They have to get to that phase.
They have to go through the graduate student phase.
And we could be cutting off the future of American academia,
scientific research, technology and
all that by not properly appreciating the graduate students we have right now.
Now, what they did in this particular case, making them pay immediately.
There is as far as we can tell, no precedent for that.
No other university has conducted themselves in this way,
let alone trying to shut off their health insurance instantly.
Now, thankfully it appears that was reversed because the union pointed out
that legally they have to provide 60 days of health insurance.
By the way, it's supposed to be a thing where you cannot remove it without
the 60 days.
It appears at the university manually overrode that.
But that has apparently been been fixed because the union,
they've been able to reverse that.
But that said, I want everyone to get fired up about this and
put pressure on the university.
I know that this might not be the sort of position that you have, but
as we always say, our power, our influence,
our ability to influence these institutions does rise and fall together.
That's why we focus on the rail workers and people who work at Starbucks and
who work the warehouses at Amazon and yes,
indeed the graduate students at universities like this.
This is very much a situation where a rising tide raises all boats and so
we need to constantly be vigilant even for
people who might work very different sorts of jobs than we do.
Any final comments guys.
>> I just add that Temple University is not struggling financially.
There are some universities that are having a difficult time in terms of their
their finances.
Temple University has a pretty sizable endowment.
So even if the university has crunched the numbers.
And said, okay, well maybe it's gonna cost us a little bit more to pay the graduate
students, so maybe it'd be easier just to bust the union, but don't do that.
You can afford to do this.
It's the right thing to do for your community, for the university,
for these graduate students, for the undergraduates they teach, don't be cheap,
don't bust them this way.
That's ridiculous.
>> Beautifully said guys.
>> Thank you, by the way, just right away, I don't know if we cover this,
the main show, but I saw that Nintendo had like a bad last quarter, whatever.
And in response,
they raised their workers pay by like 10% apparently to motivate them or whatever.
Like you got to constantly remind people.
>> They got a whole different work in Japan than we do.
Like it's just different.
>> Yeah, 100%.
Like we obviously we focus here at TYT on the United States and I get it,
this is where we live or whatever.
But there are other ways to run corporations, to run universities,
to organize your police to organize jails and prisons and things like that.
There are amazing alternatives already working in many other countries.
It's almost like our elected officials should start to take inspiration
from those.