Last week, graduate student workers at Fordham University in the Bronx went on a three-day strike in response, they say, to the administration’s refusal to bargain in good faith. Jacobin spoke to some of the grad workers.
(Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty Images)
On Tuesday, April 24, graduate student workers at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York, walked out on a three-day strike over an unfair labor practice charge. According to Fordham grad workers, represented by the Fordham Graduate Student Workers–Communications Workers of America (FGSW-CWA), the university is refusing to bargain in good faith. Grad students voted overwhelmingly to form the union in a National Labor Relations Board election in April 2022; they are now trying to negotiate their first contract with Fordham.
Graduate workers at the university say the administration’s bad-faith bargaining tactics are particularly egregious given that many students struggle to find housing and experience food insecurity; international workers, who aren’t legally able to work outside the university, are particularly vulnerable. Jacobin’s Sara Wexler talked to Fordham grad workers about last week’s walkout, the union’s demands, and the state of bargaining.
Sara Wexler
Why did you all walk out last week?
Marshawn Brewer
We walked out because we’re in the process of bargaining our contract and we’ve been bargaining it for around seven months now. The walkout was a response to the bad-faith bargaining of the upper management of our school.
They have a lawyer who is engaging in a tactic called “surface bargaining,” which is meant to stonewall the bargaining process by rejecting any proposals, by not moving forward at all. This is meant to wear the opposition down through attrition, so the momentum of the union will slow, people will be like, “Well, nothing’s happening,” and want to give up.
Because he was using this tactic, we weren’t getting any results; there was no momentum in bargaining. We knew that the only way we could change this was to show them that we had the power to withhold our labor, and that that in turn would energize the bargaining process and make them take our requests more seriously.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
The union just started last year actually; this is our first contract. Our demands are higher wages and better health care; job assignments are very important. And there are more specific demands, things that don’t necessarily apply to everyone, but are just as important — like access to childcare, paid family leave, those sorts of things. These are the types of demands that we’ve brought to the university, and we have received basically nothing in return.
Most of the time management doesn’t even show up with the proposals pulled up or printed. It feels like they’re there just to waste our time.
When you think of good-faith bargaining, it’s hard — because they have their interests and we have our interests, but there should still be some proactive approach to this. If you’re showing up to the table for after fifty hours of bargaining, and we’re the only ones bringing ways we can change the status quo, ways for the situation to be better for all grad students all across the board, and you’re coming in with literally nothing. . . . Most of the time management doesn’t even show up with the proposals pulled up or printed. They don’t have the information that would make negotiations easier to approach. So it feels like they’re there just to waste our time.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
One good example that we’ve been discussing in several bargaining sessions now is that we would like to have it in our contract that somebody can only be dismissed under just-cause reasoning, which is what Fordham has in other contracts with other unions in the university — but management have refused to put that in. We’ve spent hours discussing definitions of legal terms, and there hasn’t been any change to this status quo. They have completely rejected every single proposal that we’ve had for protections for international students. They haven’t even considered that.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
Another aspect that we’ve found very frustrating is that the administration’s approach outside of the bargaining sessions has been to completely ignore the existence of the union. That has been the case during town halls and their general approach to communicating with undergrads and alumni — they’ve just played it off as if we’re not here.
That changed with the announcement of the walkout. The response was an interesting email that was sent out by President Tania Tetlow to the whole undergrad body. It’s made its rounds on Twitter; the language in the email was just baffling. It was baffling to see them take that approach.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
Obviously the union-busting language is expected, but the tone of the email was very condescending, and it was calling us entitled. They were saying that we wanted to have more benefits than others in the Fordham community, which is completely wrong. It was an email full of just plain lies and misinformation. We actually got a lot more support from certain communities after the email was sent out because of how obviously condescending and wrong the email was.
But that was the first time management actually recognized that we are a union and that we are present and trying to bargain with them. We have asked the president to meet with us several times, especially when she first got to Fordham. We sent a couple of emails, and she never tried to have a conversation with us. She’s never been at the bargaining table. All the information that she’s getting is whatever she gets from her bargaining team. Unless she comes to the table, she won’t really know what is happening in the room.
Sara Wexler
Can you say a little bit about what it’s like to be a graduate student at Fordham? I read that the stipend is about $28,000; what is the experience for graduate students trying to survive in New York on that stipend?
Marshawn Brewer
There are a multitude of survival problems that go with the $28,000 salary. One of them is that a lot of times you need a guarantor to get an apartment, and because we aren’t able to afford that on our salary, we need a cosigner. Many students don’t have people they can rely on for that. Second, if you don’t have access to those types of funds or community support, you have to find an apartment that might not be legal or you might need to find housing with four to five other people. So you can find yourself in precarious situations.
Third, the housing, the stipend, and related conditions impact international students a lot. They often don’t get paid in a timely manner when they first get here. So, as an international student, not only do you get a small stipend, but you don’t get paid for months on end sometimes. And you have to rely on people in the Fordham community, other grad students, and sometimes families back home.
As an international student, not only do you get a small stipend, but you don’t get paid for months on end sometimes.
Many international students struggle with housing because of these precarious situations. We have proposals to try to alleviate some of these things, such as having the university provide housing over the summer so that international students can transition quicker or having the option for students to be paid with their A number as opposed to a Social Security number, which would speed up payments. And the university has rejected all those proposals.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
Not only is the stipend lower than $30,000 a year, but it’s also taxed, and it only covers the nine months of the academic year. We don’t get paid over the summer, which is difficult for everybody, but especially for international students because we’re legally not allowed to work outside of the university. So a lot of us do under-the-table jobs, babysitting or any other gig, basically, that will pay cash to try to get by over the summer.
Besides the housing situation, there are also a lot of people who experience food insecurity because the money is just not enough; on top of paying taxes out of the stipend, we’re also supposed to pay some fees to the university. The university doesn’t cover the full amount of the health insurance. We usually pay a little above $2,000 out of that stipend a year.
It’s impossible to survive on that stipend. At the beginning of this year, one of us had to house an international student who was able to afford just a few days in a hotel when they first arrived, but nobody provided them with any aid to find housing, and they were going to be on the street that night if nobody would take them in.
The university administration knew about the issue, which continues to be a problem. We had another international student from Ukraine who also faced difficulty finding housing when he first arrived. He was trying to find housing, and Fordham University just didn’t do anything for him.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
I remember going to the first negotiation session that I attended, and this was a topic that came up. The response from the university’s lawyer and their negotiation team was like, “Hey, you know what you’re getting into. It’s New York City baby, that’s how it is.” And I’m paraphrasing here, but what the lawyer said was, it’s a personal problem and Fordham is not going to delve into those. So [the message from] their lawyer and the president of the university is, come to New York, but we’re not paying you enough to find proper housing and we’re not paying you in a timely way so that you can even make the first payment. Were you able to find an apartment? That’s just a problem that you have to deal with on your own.
I just remember sitting in that bargaining session and hearing them say this and thinking, they don’t want us here, or they’re at least not making any effort to make us feel like we’re welcome, appreciated, and valued at the university. For me, going to class or doing any of the tasks that I had to do for the week after that . . . I was like, “Where’s the motivation here if it feels like the value that we bring to the university is completely unappreciated?”
As Gaby was saying, international students are forced to find other ways of financing their summers. It’s just crazy finding funding for three to four months out of the year when you can’t work outside of the university, and jobs within the university are very limited. Even once you can teach — I can’t teach yet, I’m a first year — that’s an avenue that, because of Fordham’s rising tuition, which they just raised 6 percent, becomes more and more unavailable. Students are unable to pay for a summer course.
International students are forced to find other ways of financing their summers. It’s crazy finding funding for three to four months out of the year when you can’t work outside of the university.
So yeah, you can just see the avenues, the ways to find funding, closing around you. The alternatives are you have savings, a rich family member, or you have another type of funding — or you have to find something under the table. And at that point, because you’re an international student, you’re under a lot of scrutiny for your visa status. You’re forced to make the wager: Am I willing to take this under-the-table job, knowing that if anything were ever to come up, then my visa’s out the window? And any prospects of getting approved to stay here afterward on a job visa are also out the window? It’s a very precarious situation.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
And of course this is always happening while we’re trying to do our best teaching our students, doing our research, and working for the university — because Fordham works because we do, right? The president says that she wants to see diverse backgrounds and diverse voices and faces in the university. But when it comes to protecting the people who bring that to the university, we don’t hear anything from them.
Sara Wexler
What’s the next step after the walkout? Do you foresee a longer strike?
Marshawn Brewer
It’s hard to make a determination on that now. Upward of 90 percent of first contracts end without a strike. So if we go by the data that we have on hand, a strike shouldn’t be what occurs. But we are going to need the capacity to strike. We’re definitely going to have to be strike-ready regardless of whether a strike is on the horizon or not. The idea is to be building momentum for the capacity to strike and to be willing to execute that. That is what we’re trying to do currently.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
We’ve opened a strike fund because there were already people during the walkout who were hourly workers who were not going to get paid for the hours that they joined the walkout. And that’s already a few thousand dollars. That’s why we started the strike fund right now — to be able to cover their wages.
Marshawn Brewer
We’re going to see whether the walkout is going to have impact on bargaining. While we were bargaining during the walkout and the protest outside, the university definitely had a change of tone. They were definitely more demure in their responses, and our arguments started to make a lot more sense to them. It’s funny how your arguments make a lot more sense when people are outside chanting and the windows are shaking and you hear the signs and everything like that — your logic becomes much more precise.
We’re going to see what their response on just cause is. Because just cause is a staple of some of their past agreements, and the only reason they wouldn’t want to put it in our contract is because they’re bargaining in bad faith. If we offer a counter to them on just cause and they say they’ll consider it, if we get a positive indicator on that, if they agree to just cause during the next bargaining session — that might be a sign that we are moving toward good faith and that a contract could be on the horizon.
Sara Wexler
Have you faced any challenges in organizing?
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
There are certain departments of students who have been hard to reach out to. There’s definitely a lot of fear. I can speak to that as an international student: there’s a lot that’s so ambiguous in terms of how are we protected, especially in terms of fears of getting your visa removed or something like that. We know in general that the United States is not a very welcoming place for immigrants.
So that fear is looming a little bit behind trying to organize in the workplace — and not only for internationals. For a lot of people, I think, there’s kind of a stigma that unions might not be the greatest. People have reservations. But, again, after the letter that the president sent out that was blatantly condescending and horrible in so many ways, a lot of people who were afraid or who had reservations were like, “Ok, I’m ready to walk out after seeing the way we’re being treated and disrespected all the time.”
Marshawn Brewer
I think there are pockets of the graduate student body who have some ideological reservations. Then there’s, like Gaby said, the fear of some international students about what could transpire if they lean in too hard into the process.
And then there’s just a sense of apathy among a few people. Once the union isn’t front and center — it was last year — there is a point at which a lot of people drop off and aren’t paying attention. So you have to reactivate them, tell them why this is important and why they have to get involved.
You also have the problem of third partying, where people who are not as involved in the union see the union as something separate from themselves. You have to get them to understand that we are all in this together, and that it’s not “us versus them” — it’s all of us together in relation to the upper administration.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
Also, on a more practical level, there’s the challenge that there are students who are here for a shorter amount of time by virtue of the type of program that they’re doing. They might still be student employees, they might still be workers and part of the unit; but because some people are here only for three semesters, unless you’re a PhD student that has an investment in the institution for five, six, seven years, it’s harder to say, “This fight is worth it. This is something that I want to involve myself in.” So planting the seeds of this feeling of solidarity, of “maybe I’m not going to reap the benefits of this contract, but people after me might be able to” — it’s challenging.
We heard during our walkout, at the closing rally, from a master’s student, and you do see master’s students that are very involved. So I’m not going to say that it’s impossible to activate those sorts of parts of the unit, but it’s certainly a little more challenging. The rough part is that these are people that are still very much affected by the conditions under which we work, by the problems that affect us all. It’s just harder for them to see how “this fight is worth it for me.”
Sara Wexler
Have you been in touch with any other unions? Are there other communities that have expressed solidarity with your contract fight?
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
Individually, some of us have been in touch with certain people at other unions that have recently gone on strike, for example at Temple University and the University of California, to discuss how their negotiations are going or how they go about certain things.
On our social media, the solidarity between unions is really strong. Other unions have been retweeting our strike fund. They’ve been offering their support every time that we post about a big thing that we have. For the walkout, a lot of them were supporting from afar. We got some people from other CWA units and locals come to our walkout, and they brought food to help us out and just cheer us on. They came to the closing rally at the university.
Sara Wexler
How do you think a good contract will transform graduate student life at Fordham?
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
It’ll transform the lives of all of us a lot. It’s terrifying and difficult to go into class thinking, “I can only eat ramen noodles for the rest of the week, and have our brains function the way we need them to function in order to be able to teach and research and all these things.
It’s terrifying and difficult to go into class thinking, ‘I can only eat ramen noodles for the rest of the week.’
Even in terms of morale, it’ll transform the spirit of the university because graduate students teach about 30 percent of the classes at Fordham University. We’re in touch with the majority of first-year students who come into college, and we’re excited for our research and to teach them. But in our current conditions, sometimes we just can’t. We can’t be excited, or we can’t perform. We know that the Fordham community in general will be better with a good contract — not only will our personal living conditions improve, but the entirety of the ecosystem.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
Aside from changing the conditions under which workers are able to teach and research and be a part of the university, the proposals that we’re making are also about the ecosystem and the university at large — demands like banning NDAs [nondisclosure agreements] in cases of harassment and discrimination. Those are about making the university a safer place. The ultimate objective of the contract is to create a safer learning environment that makes everyone involved in it better off.