Background
Sina was the only international student in the initial bargaining team of 15 people. During an interview on Dec 8th, 2023, he shared his thoughts on bargaining. We released this interview on Apr 22nd, 2024.
- 00:00:07 Arjun
I know that there was a vote for your Union to be approved?
- 00:00:30 Sina
Yes. The Union is chosen with 93% Yes vote. This vote was the result of a long campaign started two years ago. The heart of the campaign was face to face communication of union members and enthusiasts with other graduate students. So, basically each department had some highly motivated students supporting the idea of having a union. Let’s call them local leaders. And they tried to convince students that It’s beneficial for them to vote Yes and form a Union. The main benefits everyone agreed on were first and foremost raises in salaries, and then having better healthcare plans and more transparency and support for students facing harassment especially in interactions with their PIs. Another main point to convince students about the idea of the union was the success of other unions such as Columbia and above all UCLA. They had huge raises in their salaries. When I began my PhD at USC, we got more than UCLA, but our wages remained the same for around 5 Years and in some cases even decline if your fellowship changed to TAship RAship. So, the idea of having a union that can fight for students was quite attractive for the majority and no serious opposition was formed.
- 00:01:57 Arjun
OK, so this is across multiple multiple schools and departments at USC. And is it for graduate and faculty or specifically graduate students?
- 00:02:00 Sina
Yes, exactly. It is the union for all graduate workers. Not undergrads, not Masters unless they are officially TA or RA, and not faculties. Even Fellowship PhD students in some cases could not be fitted into the graduate worker category.
Regarding the participation of different departments, in most departments the majority of students participated in the voting procedure. Some more, some less. For instance, while departments such as industrial engineering or CS actively participated by more than 60 percent of participation rate, the Mechanical engineering department had much less participation due to not having local leaders encouraging students to participate. Here is a key point: Students from a department trust their friends and colleagues from their own department more. That’s why the idea of local leaders was so effective.
And after forming the union, the bargaining process started shortly. The goal of the bargaining was to pressure USC to sign a much better contract to maximize the compensation and well-being of USC grad students. The bargaining team consisted of 15 members all USC students plus a lawyer from UAW to help the negotiation process. Obviously, graduate students with zero or limited expertise could not effectively bargain with an expert team of USC leadership. An important note which is my personal experience is that USC put most of its effort in the bargaining process rather than trying to prevent the union to be formed. As an example, Caltech is currently in the process of forming a union. There, the leadership is actively opposing the idea of forming a union with a very strong and aggressive language. USC was not like that. Anti-union campaign was very limited and ineffective. This strategy works better in my opinion, because it saves face for USC and they can put all their efforts to minimize the gain during the bargaining process.
In the USC team there was a very good lawyer. Basically, he was the only guy talking and in my opinion making decisions. All other members from USC were silent. Maybe 10 sentences in the entire bargaining procedure combined. I could remember in the first bargaining session he mentioned I worked in so many different occasions for more than 40 years implying this bargaining process is not something difficult for him to handle. He delayed the bargaining procedure very effectively in so many sessions and occasions. The procedure was kinda slow. For some simple and in my opinion low priority matters we spend so many sessions to reach to a common ground. He was talking very slowly, emphasizing on words rather than the general idea and so many other tricks to slow down the process.
- 00:05:46 Arjun
Do you think that expanding that timeline was a way to kind of burn people out of organizing? Like a tactic.
- 00:05:56 Sina
At least from the USC side Yes. Definitely. They postponed some very important aspects of the bargaining to the summer. The reason was in summer students were not in the campus. Many students return to their homes. Internationals visit their family back to their countries and many students to internships during the summer. So, the graduate students are not fully presented in the campus. USC somehow showed some dirty tactics to slow down the procedure and reduce the effectiveness of the bargaining. Of course, it was a nice strategy if we put ourselves into the USC shoes. If we consider their objectives they were actually pretty good.
- 00:06:51 Arjun
What are the obstacles?
- 00:06:59 Sina
There have been many criticisms from the beginning. First of all I should mention in majority of the cases, there were no negative or hidden intentions. But it is nice to see them as lessons for us in future. First, the bargaining team was formed by voting. But only 17 students were candidates. Two from HSC could not make it. Basically we had zero representation from HSC. Moreover, only one international student was in the bargaining team. We know more than 50 percent of grad students are international yet they have very limited representation. It is very important to understand the root cause of this. I must emphasize the union tried its best to have as many internationals as possible but the participation was limited. My personal opinion is this problem is two-fold. From the students side, internationals have usually less confident to participate in such groups. They see language as a barrier, they think they might not be useful enough, and overall they have naturally less confidence. On the other hand, while the union culture is friendly toward some marginalized groups, it is not yet inclusive for Internationals. A major reason is the social movement and union cultures in the US are much much much different that the equivalent movements and groups in other countries. Therefore, international students might feel quite distant from the union. Even for me some aspects of the union culture were not understandable. They might be quite obvious for American activists. But for a typical Chinese, Indian, Korean, Iranian, Arab, or African student it might be quite strange. That’s why I think using the perspective of internationals are quite important. I don’t mean just having some of them as sample representation just for statistics. But, listening and understanding their ideas and encouraging them to talk even if they think it opposes the general consensus among American activists.
- 00:08:49 Arjun
International students are also wealthy?
- 00:08:57 Rao
I think it’s kind of different for the PhD students. We all live on our wages paid by the USC. So a lot of people are not very rich actually.
- 00:09:11 Sina
International PhD students not necessarily. They mostly rely on the payments and tuition waivers from USC. Some of them might be wealthy, but statistically speaking the average wealth of PhD internationals are way below the average of USC students overall.
- 00:09:55 Arjun
What would your call to action be moving forward in the next few months?
- 00:10:09 Sina
So one thing is we want to see more transparency. For example, one of my concerns was we pay some dues to union as part of the contract, 1.44% of our salary, each month. And I think it should be transparent how they want to spend that money. Detailed and itemized spending record should be public and accessible to everyone. Also the four year contract is not a good idea to me. For example many, let’s say even now around 80% says yes. But many of them will go in two years. Many of the PhD students are not here anymore, and there are new students. So I think it’s good if they can participate in the voting every year. I think the contract should be yearly, not for four years.
My major major concern is the interaction of the union and students. To me, the focus of union so far was to have good “statistics” rather than fully engaging students. That might seem natural. We wanted to form a union. Let’s target for majority yes. But it is happening again and again. I asked some students why are you voting Yes to the contract? Their honest answer was because they asked us so many times. They did not even read the basics of the contract. That’s problematic. That’s why while we have majority yes in almost all votings, there are very few actually willing to strike or effectively fight for their rights through the union.
We already observed the consequence of this. Many students were preparing for the striking. We know that. And suddenly they said, OK, we reached to a final contract. No strike. in the last moment they said OK, we reached an agreement and the question is why? Because we, especially in engineering school, were supposed to see much more increase. Even I promised to so many of my friends the increase is much higher than what USC already promised. I think most of the no voters are from the engineering school. because I talked to many of our people, our students in our department and I was like, OK, when I was advertising union I was like: We have many increase in our salary, let’s say 6-7%. This 1.44% is not nothing compared to that. And if we don’t have union, we don’t see that much increase. And now they are coming back to me and say we expected much more than this. They ask why it is happening. Many of them, especially in engineering. They prepared everything for striking and then they said we don’t strike. So it’s not easy to coordinate again it needs time. It needs to convince the students. And so it’s basically not possible anymore at this stage.
Many engineering students are not happy and one question is: Maybe we could reach a better agreement, much more increase in salaries, because I know some others, like UCLA had much more increase in their salary and why not USC? There are a couple of reasons. Maybe, they say USC had a better lawyer for the negotiation. We should at least know why. why it happened. Is it because of the students? I don’t think it is. We cannot. We can’t blame students for that. Maybe the bargaining team says or the Union says we could not convince as many people as possible to do striking. And that, let’s say, for example, we should count in 70% of students in order to be very effective, but we couldn’t go more than like 30-40%. And if it is the case, why they couldn’t have? Why the Union could not have a good communication and relationship with the students and that’s a very important question. I mentioned some potential answers earlier. But we should explore it more and not pretend it did not happen.
- 00:15:46 Arjun
Umm yeah, that’s interesting. I know in regards to like some of the organizing that’s been happening around students who want USC to divest from Israel, it feels like there is more support, but the institution makes it very hard to, you know, like we can’t find a place to meet. We can’t, like, just certain barriers that are in the way of people getting together and organizing. Did you feel like that was a part of why, like, more students were involved in the striking?
- 00:16:26 Sina
At least in USC, I guess. For example, if we have some public gatherings for Union and we could do that. We could. It was not banned by USC. And I don’t think they dare or want to create any problem explicitly. Many students do not even know about gatherings. They were disregarding the emails from union because there were many, many of them saying, oh, I’m tired of hearing a lot of like repetitive things again and again. And it seems they want we should just vote yes. And many of the people voting yes, they were like, OK, they asked us to vote yes and we voted yes. And they were like, did you read the contract? Did you know you cannot strike for four years? Did you know it’s for four years? Not for one year. And they were, you know…… But The thing is, at least when I was in the bargaining team, my understanding was not negotiable Target is the living payment of 45,000. Yeah. And now it’s not like that. It’s 40k. And I think after this annual increase, after three or four years we will have that much increase, but we wanted it to be the first step.
The university, before forming the contract, they had an annual. like kind of , they had a program for five years, increasing salaries each year, for example, 2-3%, something like that. For many students, it’s better now. But at least for my department in the ISE or many other engineering departments, it’s not that different, given that they should pay some 1.44% to union, it might be in some cases even worse.
So we need to know why. And the idea of a strike was we wanted to show: We mean it, we want this. We deserve to be paid living payment. And then the USC and union reached an agreement with minimum transparency. I don’t know why. Maybe they say we could not. We didn’t see that much potential in our striking. We could not gather as many students as we wanted. Why, for example, in UCLA they had a very strong striking campaign, but not in USC. What happened here? Many students have some speculation that they have their own idea. I don’t want to mention all of them, but I would say it’s important to talk about it, at least to have better, like future bargaining and better campaigns and to kind of attract most, many more, students that study from international.
- 00:21:12 Rao
Can I ask you another question. So I’m curious that, for the first part of the bargaining you were the only international student in the bargaining team. I’m wondering how it has been. because we have a proposal for international student. The immigration article. I’m wondering how it was for you to push through things about it. and also why you later decided to quit the bargaining team.
- 00:21:39 Sina
yeah, the international student committee and rao and many others. We talked so many times and basically found some very common demands across all international students. For example, guarantee of housing for the first year students when they are coming here, it’s not easy for an international student. They don’t have any connection here to find a house and sometimes USC doesn’t assign them any house. Or some visa issues and documents that you need, yeah. So the response was like because they are not yet technically workers, we cannot do anything about that. So, we didn’t mention it at all. Basically one part was that. Another part was visa issues are beyond even the university’s capacity. It is from Homeland Security Department, so we cannot do anything about this. And so many of the top priorities for our students were basically even not put in the table. I don’t blame the Union, maybe they are not feasible due to the nature of the laws. Maybe It’s not easy to push international demands. But at least the prize was we can handle such demands using Union budget and resources.
All in all, we can see many internationals don’t participate in the bargaining or in the union sessions. It’s hard to completely know why. I mentioned culture of the Union might not be pleasing to them. But it is crucial to see what is the perspective of Chinese and Indians and Iranians and the Japanese and so on about that. We have many big groups of international students. For example, among Iranians I know we have more than 200 PhD students, but maybe five or six of them even talking about Union.
- 00:24:26 Arjun
Could it have to have to do anything with citizenship and kind of like fear that citizenship?
- 00:24:33 Sina
Exactly. Some of them were like, even for voting. They were like, for example, if you want to apply for green card does it affect it? They had some concerns like that and some others were like, OK, it’s kind of American thing. We are not interested in that bargaining sessions or the meetings of the Union. Yeah. And we tried, some of us which were international. We tried to convince the student to participate more. But yeah, usually there were very few proportion of them. Even I had some blame, at some point I were like, OK, vote Yes, I’ll explain it later, at the beginning of the process. But it was kind of the same thing happening again and again. Like we were just collecting votes from students. it was like they were not actively participating. So just voting yes for forming the Union and voting yes for the contract. Voting yes to something they didn’t even know about.
- 00:25:59 Arjun
So there was a small percentage of people that were involved in the process and they were telling people basically what to do if, like, if they were in the Union. And like international students who weren’t necessarily, like, well represented within that like small minority.
- 00:26:22 Sina
I would say some part of it is coming back to international and as you said, they have some fears from citizenship, maybe language barriers. I think these are the most important factors. On the other hand, most leaders in the departments were not international, so that’s a fact. For example, if I talk to Iranian, it’s much easier. Even in our department we had a Chinese leader, he was very effective in talking and basically showing the students what he having union. It is very important. I think you know one thing about unions is like they emphasize on inclusivity. Having as much as ideas we have from different groups, so it’s usually if you talk about inclusivity maybe they say race or ethnicity or gender these kind of things. But I think another dimension is nationality, at least in universities. We don’t have that much inclusivity in terms of nationality, which we want to see Chinese perspective, Korean perspective, Indian perspective, we don’t have that much of it. I think that’s very necessary to see this kind of perspective in next year. For example, in our department, I know more than 50% of PhD students are Chinese, and if we don’t have any Chinese in our bargaining team or in our meetings, it’s a great loss. Basically, we lose 50% of students. it’s like not having any woman perspective in our team you know. It does not make sense.
- 00:28:37 Arjun
Could do you think it has anything to do with the fact that, like I know that people, at least from India who come, they primarily go into industries that are financially, like comfortable, like engineering, business is like what I mainly see Indian students or CS. So I’m like, does their job security have anything to do with their lack of interest in unionizing?
- 00:29:09 Sina
In general maybe, engineering schools like, computer science and those kind of major. So after the graduation, usually their salary will be 5-6 times more than what they are earning during PhD. If they are toward the end of their PhD, then maybe they don’t care that much, assuming that they just consider themselves not their friends.
but I don’t I agree with that. because many of students, they are in the PhD getting a PhD takes 5-6 years, especially after COVID it was more delayed for so many students 5-6-7 years and in this period they are basically not very rich, so they need that money and they care a lot even in engineering school you can see. if you ask what is your top demand they still say raising salary.
But yes, maybe some of them that are toward the end of their PhD, maybe they care less.
- 00:30:31 Rao
Actually, so I’m still wondering like why you quit the bargaining team.
- 00:30:37 Sina
So part of it was private, but I would say mostly it was the semester I should defend my thesis. I am defending it soon so I need some time to do focus on that. ah, part of it was due to that. And there were some other reasons as well. And honestly, I didn’t feel that much useful at some point. after the international bargaining session, maybe, I cannot add anything more. if there are some other students they can do something better. Having said that, what I expected was at the end of the bargaining we have much better contract in terms of financial amenities because other universities had that. And we want to know why we didn’t strike. So still I think that there is no response to that. And if there were some serious issues, we should find, what are these issues? And understand it, in the future.