GSWOC International Student Committee email back up

May 23, 2023

Hi everyone,

Our bargaining team have drafted the immigration article.

Here is the link, please take a look:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10paBTJDaT0-LZphIkJ_sCOizvVF04roez2SZpAn6-yo/edit

We will discuss this and other two drafts in the general OC meeting tomorrow at 4PM:

Access needs/reasonable accommodations
Non discrimination/anti bullying

And to recap, here is the document we’ve used to track issues people have mentioned related to immigration status: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q6fnGQfVAycQTcX91x5mvCduGh9U9ATxeAvlF9f6ApU/edit

And here is the zoom link and agenda for the meeting tomorrow at 4PM: https://zoom.us/xx

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jTwlqqYZFchfT-_SWGed2-aXw0wu752dOxNhqHHyXk4/edit

In solidarity, Best R

May 31, 2023

Hi everyone,

We want to share with you all the recent discussion about the immigration article. Overall, we think the draft is well-written, much better than some unions have won.

But, we would like to offer more feedback to the bargaining team members as they produce more drafts over the next two weeks. On the 15th of June bargaining team members are scheduled to meet with the University to present proposals on immigration, visas, and other issues that will have a large impact on international students.

Also we want to keep everyone in our google group updated of the discussion.

We think there are some common questions we’ve had about the draft, and some have been explained by the bargaining team. The most common question we have heard is, “why are x,y,z issues not in this article?”

Here are some of the answers we received from the bargaining team members:

It may be included in other articles.

.e.g. Housing support, delayed payment will be in another article. Some common issues are shared by international and domestic students, so the immigration articles may not be the suitable place. But there may be unique trouble for international students in the same issue, we will continue following bargaining updates.
It may be related to grievance.

.e.g. If OIS mistakenly revoked someone’s visa, and misled the student, we can file an official grievance. We are reaching out to organizers in other unions, trying to get a better understanding about how long this kind of process takes, and what compensation the person may get. Also, if there are other ways to prevent this from happening, rather than to try to fix problems after they have already happened. For example, we might ask OIS to give students 14 days notice before revoking the visa so that they can contact another lawyer.
It may be an academic issue and hard to negotiate. These may be addressed in other articles via an indirect solution.

.e.g. Degree certification, language requirement / ALI… these are academic issues. But if it is about training related to employment this can be covered by the employment contract with USC, and will be addressed in an article for job related training.
In-coming students are not considered as employees yet. So there are limitations to what we can achieve through bargaining, but we can bargain for these as relocation assistance/reimbursements.

We also had a discussion about CPT, which is authorization needed for any off-campus employment before graduation. For programs with very little summer TA/RA, this is very important financially. For others, CPT is necessary for summer internship, which is important for career development.

In the past few weeks we noticed that at several universities across the country, OIS-equivalent offices have tightened CPT policies. Similarly, at USC, we noticed more complaints of CPT processing delay compared with last year.

Therefore, we may seek to put a clause in the bargaining proposals to ensure that USC commits to providing documents for CPT in a “timely manner” or something similar.

We reached out to organizers in other unions for more information about CPT. We realized that it is hard to negotiate in contract bargaining. One union proposed two things:

the university shall not impose its own restriction on top of what is required by the federal government.
All programs should provide CPT.

But at bargaining, the university argued that CPT is an academic issue. So they failed to win anything in the contract. https://grad-union.mit.edu/issues/why-cpt-is-an-academic-matter/

Given this issue is important but hard to negotiate, even if we fail to win anything in the contract, we think it would still be important to ask USC for commitment.

For visa fee reimbursement, the current proposal may cost millions of dollars for USC. We think a more realistic goal would be more concrete on what specific fee will be reimbursed, and even set a quota, similar to the term about international GSW Assistance Fund.

Thank everyone for reading this email.

I appreciate your work to keep our union strong,

I’ll try to observe the bargaining tomorrow in the afternoon.

Have a good night,

Best,

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