Temple Graduate Student Strike

There’s a pretty crazy strike going on right now by the graduate students at Temple University. The best I can tell from the multiple stories I read, it is lead by some pretty hard-core students, but they have far from universal support among their comrades and didn’t even tell the American Federation of Teachers, with which they are affiliated, that they were going to do this. So it feels like, well, a lot of graduate student unionism that is a lot more ideological and vanguard than other forms of American unionism. According to Temple, only 150 of the 750 graduate students in the bargaining unit are actually on strike. Hard to win that way.

The issues are legit--the pay is really bad, especially for Philadelphia. They make less than our starting graduate students do up here in Rhode Island, and while we hardly have the lowest cost of living in the country, compared to Philly, it’s not bad.

What’s really crazy is the response of the Temple administration, which is threatening to pull the tuition waivers that are part of the standard graduate student package. It’s not legally clear whether they can do this or not. This gets back to the issues of what is compensation and what is not in a graduate union, which is a somewhat different employment situation than other forms of work. This is not taxable income, so it seems dubious that one could pull it, but the Temple administration seems to be going for full unionbusting here.