UMass Graduate Students March for Liveable Wages

“Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”

Dozens of students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst chanted at a rally on September 15 as the campus’s overburdened and underpaid graduate student union members laid out the harms they were suffering as a result of low wages and slowed negotiations.

Co-chairs of the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) Hannah Ku and Ragini Jha started the rally by calling for cost-of-living adjustments to offset bloated expenses such as local housing costs. They said that UMass’s penny-pinched wages have made it “impossible to live in Pioneer Valley” for many student workers, straining both their employment and their education.

“The university would be nothing without our help,” Jha told protestors.

Shortly after, the rapidly growing group marched to UMass’s main administrative building, where organizers continued to condemn what they called the university’s harmful labor practices and to lead protestors in chants, demanding liveable wages and denouncing unfair and exploitative treatment of graduate student workers.

They  reported that they could not afford basic needs such as rent, groceries, or utilities and said that UMass  prefers fellowships over traditional hires to avoid paying graduate students fairly or allowing them union protections. 

Tarang, a first-year student in the economics PhD program who is a union member and the steward for his department, gave a speech in which they said that“…education here [is] more and more difficult to get, if not entirely inaccessible. Most of us here are rent burdened. We’re all living [in a state of] precarity. This fight is everyone’s fight.”

Testimony from the GEO’s Disability and Access Caucus added that the costs of healthcare and accommodations for disabled residents meant that disabled workers are hit the hardest by the lack of cost-of-living increases.

Among the speakers was Patrick Burke, the president of the local UAW chapter, who remarked, “Let the chancellor know that he cannot hide from the working class.” Burke encouraged those gathered to work together, as workers’ diverse issues are ultimately “all one fight for social and economic justice.”

Union members further spoke out against UMass’s habit of refusing to engage with the GEO, including restricting the negotiation space to disallow a larger group of union members to attend. As one speaker put it, “They see our rights as liabilities.”

The rally proceeded to quietly march into the administrative offices, where students requested to speak with UMass Chancellor Javier Reyes, who had so far avoided direct contact with the union. Organizers asked staff for a five-minute window to speak to Reyes and requested that he respect workers’ commitment and sacrifices. However, Reyes’s office claimed that he was unavailable and did not answer their request for information about his future availability.

After being denied the chance to speak to Reyes, in a show of unwavering commitment to workers’ rights, protestors held an impromptu sit-in outside the office for the next two hours.

Later, Ku and Jha commented, “We will continue to plan further actions in support of COLA [Cost of Living Adjustment] and a fair contract during this bargaining year. It is a mark of our success that the chancellor has now agreed to meet with leadership next month and we will continue to push for him to meet with all of membership as part of the democratic process.”

The rally and sit-in were an impressive display of solidarity between workers from across campus, as well as undergraduate students and employees not represented by GEO.
Following the rally, Tarang remarked, “Everyone deserves better. The fight is on for a UMass Amherst which works for us and the broader community.” 

Read additional reporting about the GEO action in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian