Michael Dwyer/AP Photo
Members of the Harvard University graduate students union protested, May 1, 2019, over contract terms. In October, Harvard agreed to guarantee job security for students unable to return to the U.S. due to visa-related issues.
At a time when graduate students on numerous campuses are striking for recognition, many of their leading activists come from foreign lands, and face challenges beyond those that their fellow activists who are American citizens must confront.
When Marjan left New York last June, she didn’t think she’d be gone longer than a couple of months. It was supposed to be a routine trip home. As an international student, she had to return to Iran to renew her visa. It was time for a break, anyway: She’d just wrapped up year five of her Ph.D. program at The New School and scored a pair of teaching assistantships for the fall. At 33, she was in a good position to land a full-time job in economics when she graduates in May.
At her visa appointment, the consular officer determined that her application needed to undergo an “extreme vetting” process, a policy President Trump implemented in 2017. Coupled with the travel ban, it gave immigration authorities leeway to more rigorously screen citizens from Muslim-majority countries—supposedly out of national-security concerns. The officer didn’t give Marjan a reason for subjecting her to added scrutiny, nor an estimate of how long it might take for her case to be processed. All she could do was stay in Iran and wait.
It’s been half a year since she submitted her application, and she still hasn’t heard a word from the embassy. “It’s been a significant damage to my career,” said Marjan, who requested that her last name not be used. Over Skype, her burgundy pixie cut appeared slightly pixelated, but her raspy voice rang clear and fierce. “It just feels like your whole life is disrupted.” The substitute teaching assistants who filled in for her initially have now become permanent replacements. She’s allowed to continue with some research work, but due to U.S. sanctions, she hasn’t been able to cash out her earnings. By missing a semester, she now can’t enter the job market until 2021. Meanwhile, she’s still paying $1,200 a month in rent on her Brooklyn apartment, which her landlord had refused to let her sublet.
But she hasn’t given up. When she realized she wasn’t going to return in time for classes, she contacted her friend Aria Vaghayenegar, a fellow international student and representative on The New School’s graduate student union. Within weeks, Vaghayenegar and another union member persuaded the university’s president to write to the consulate on Marjan’s behalf. They’ve also asked the International Student and Scholar Services to seek support from Congress.
“Half of our members are international,” Vaghayenegar said. “They need more protection than domestic students, and we do all we can to fight for them.” The union can’t get the school to compensate Marjan for the wages she lost this year, he continued. But as part of a new contract that went into effect this spring, the organizing body had secured a job guarantee for students dealing with visa-related issues. If Marjan gets her visa in time for the spring semester, the school has to give her the job or reimburse her teaching stipend.
IT’S A VOLATILE time to pursue a career in academia. Three-quarters of faculty positions in higher education are off the tenure track, filled mainly by adjuncts and underpaid graduate students, according to a 2017 study from the American Association of University Professors.
Fed up with grim job prospects and poor pay, graduate employees have spurred an upsurge in labor organizing on college campuses. In the past couple of years, a spate of student unions, from The New School to Harvard University, have gone on strike to demand higher wages, lower health care costs, and more transparent grievance procedures. Increasingly, they’ve also fought for—and won—broader protections for foreign nationals, who deal with not only economic precariousness but also a hostile political climate.
International students feel the effects of a tightening job market more acutely than American ones. The F-1 visa bars holders from working longer than 20 hours a week, which means, unlike their domestic counterparts, they can’t supplement meager teaching stipends with odd jobs. As a result, many live paycheck to paycheck. “I basically cannot have a medical emergency,” said Ka Ya Lee, a fourth-year doctoral student at Harvard, and a member of its union. She lives on a $1,900 monthly stipend, half of which goes to rent. “If you’re single, don’t have a partner, and can’t rely on your family, then doing a Ph.D. is really difficult.”
“If you’re single, don’t have a partner, and can’t rely on your family, then doing a Ph.D. is really difficult.”
For all union members, to strike is to risk losing pay and valuable employment opportunities. International members, however, also risk losing their residency in the U.S. Most F-1 visas are valid for about four years, long enough to cover undergraduate and some graduate degrees. Ph.D. programs, on the other hand, can take six or seven years to complete, meaning that candidates would need to have their visas renewed at least once. (Some, like Marjan at The New School, have had to do it three times.) Securing a renewal requires written consent from dissertation advisers. If the adviser refuses to grant it, the student will have to leave the country.
“They can flip a coin and change someone’s destiny instantly,” Lee said. In November, ahead of the month-long Harvard graduate union strike that ended without a contract on January 1, Lee recorded a video testimony backing the job action. She’s worried that her act of dissent might hurt her chances of getting a visa extension next year. “I’m hoping they won’t take such desperate measures,” she said, “but the fear is always there.” Before testifying, Lee obtained the support of her adviser, who signed a non-retaliation, non-reporting agreement. But not all faculty members are sympathetic to demonstrators. Three days into the strike, the heads of several departments at Harvard sent memos asking students to report their strike status, and warning that those who participate should not expect to be paid.
“It’s a scary time to be an international student,” said Rachel Sandalow-Ash, a bargaining committee member. “Harvard has played on those fears and it’s disgusting.” Still, fully one-quarter of unionized graduate students are international, and their involvement has made an impact. In October, Harvard agreed to guarantee job security for those unable to return to the U.S. due to visa-related issues, and to provide paid leave for students to attend immigration hearings.
OVER THE PAST decade, the National Labor Relations Board has flip-flopped thrice on whether to define graduate students at private universities as employees, and thereby entitle them to collective-bargaining rights under the National Labor Relations Act. (Public universities answer to state law.) In 2016, the NLRB, then with a majority of Obama appointees, ruled in the affirmative, paving the way for teaching and research assistants at 15 elite colleges to unionize. Since then, five schools have negotiated contracts with student unions. But the board’s ruling seemed doomed by Trump’s election. This September, his appointees indicated they would reverse the Obama-era decision, arguing that the relationship between student employees and school administrations is primarily educational, not economic.
If, as expected, they rule against the student unions, the proposed change would exclude more than 81,000 graduate employees from NLRA rights, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College in New York. In response to this threat, Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin introduced the Respect Graduate Student Workers Act last month, which would essentially amend the NLRA to recognize rights for students. But unless Democrats take the presidency and both chambers of Congress in 2020, it has no chance of passing.
Without support from the board, union members can still convince schools to voluntarily recognize them and negotiate in good faith—both Georgetown University and New York University ratified their chapters this way. But voluntary recognition subjects the fate of students to the whims of administrators, which is hardly a reliable system to protect labor rights. “Some institutions value the idea of collective bargaining as a process of workplace democracy … while others will use tools through law to stop unionization,” said William Herbert, the National Center’s executive director.
In the drawn-out fight for more equitable working conditions, some students already see the NLRB as a lost cause and hope to compel colleges to grant them recognition by strategically withdrawing their labor. “Once the school realizes it can’t function without us, they’ll make concessions to lend us greater protections,” said David Borgonjon, a union leader at Columbia University, which finally agreed to bargain with graduate employees last year. “The reason we got recognition is that we built a powerful strike, put forth proposals to get people to care. We did it by mobilizing the student worker body.”
Voluntary recognition subjects the fate of students to the whims of administrators, which is hardly a reliable system to protect labor rights.
Galvanizing international students is crucial at a time when union rights are under attack. Recent demonstrations at public institutions underscore the influence they can wield in labor protests. Last spring, the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois at Chicago mounted an indefinite strike after more than a year of contract negotiations. Leading up to the strike, Jeff Schuhrke, GEO’s co-president at the time, said that it was a priority for the union to rally international graduate employees, who constitute more than half of the union’s 1,500 members.
“Lots of issues impact them,” he said. “Many come from poor countries and can’t rely on their families back home.” They also have grievances that don’t apply to domestic students, like a $135 fee to the administration for handling visa-related paperwork. According to a schoolwide survey GEO conducted, 78 percent of international student workers reported living on less than $1,800 a month; the same share said financial strife has affected their mental health.
For students from countries where dissent is criminalized, activism can be a profoundly daunting exercise. “GEO helped us find our voice,” said Zukhra Kasimova, a doctoral student from Uzbekistan, where citizens have limited freedom to protest. At GEO’s bargaining sessions, she heard testimonies of financial hardship from other international students and felt emboldened to fight for more equitable working conditions. “I realized these are real problems that need to be addressed,” she said. “It was the first time I felt like I wasn’t just complaining.”
After a three-week standoff, the school agreed to raise wages by 14 percent after three years, lower health care costs, and halve the international-student fee.
BEYOND ECONOMIC gains, unions can help foster more diverse perspectives in higher education, and not only those of immigrants and foreign nationals. Lean stipends make a poor match for exorbitant living costs in cities like Boston, Chicago, and New York, where many elite colleges are based—one reason why the field of academia has become increasingly exclusive.
This trend partly arises from administrators’ failure to grasp the complex needs of graduate students, most of whom will be in their mid-thirties before earning their degree. “Our pay and health insurance systems are set up based on undergrads’ needs,” said Emily Smith, the secretary of the University of Chicago’s graduate workers union, which has yet to be formally recognized. “But we’re not healthy people in our early twenties with no children or sick parents to support.”
Advanced degrees are particularly difficult to attain for parents like Carleigh Beriont, a 30-year-old fifth-year doctoral student at Harvard. As a teaching assistant, she receives a monthly stipend of $2,800, roughly 90 percent of which goes to her daughter’s health insurance and day care expenses. The rest goes to rent, groceries, diapers, and heat. “We’re not spending money on anything else,” she said. “It’s obscene that it costs as much to send my daughter to child care as it does to pay for four years of college.”
In advocating for fair pay, balanced work hours, and transparent grievance procedures, unions can help ensure that America’s most skilled teachers and researchers hail from various socioeconomic backgrounds, both domestic and international, bringing with them a wider range of life experiences. “Being a parent has had an immensely positive impact on my research and made me attentive to issues I wouldn’t have been before,” Beriont said. “Grad student workers shouldn’t have to be independently wealthy to pursue a career in academia. So it’s an opportunity for schools to ask: Who do we want here?”
