Learn our contract protection

A Flyer about Contract Protection
For Chinese students, 关注微信公众号 “USC GSWOC 的留学生们”。后台回复 “grievance” ，自动回复一份中文的合同保护总结。如果你希望有说中文的同学协助 fill grievance , 可以在微信公众号后台留言我们。
You can contact your department organizer for a know your right training. Also, There will be a webpage on our union website. If your department organizer couldn’t help, you can fill in this form. We will contact you.

We are also trying to build up an internal list of abusive advisors, so department organizers can check-in with their students regularly and see if advisor is doing bad things again. You can email us for access reform.caucus.at.usc.gswoc@proton.me

Fill a grievance

You can contact your department organizer. In the future it will be your steward.
If your department organizers couldn’t help, the suggestion is to email info@gswoc-usc.org

Thoughts(Rao)

Know Your Right Training talks about the key protection provided by our contract and how to fight back when it gets violated. I added some contents to the slide, encouraging people to get involved and shifting towards an bottom-up organizing model.

Encourage people to talk with their coworkers (Building a support network/community)

Last year, I met an UC mom who is an international student. She told me, she didn’t know about parental leave when she gave birth to a child. No one told her about it, she didn’t know and suffered a lot.

I realized that, in reality, it is very difficult to let everyone know every right under the contract. Especially for marginalized community, like parents, they may have little capacity for union activity. The same is true for international students, who are facing language barrier and are less involved in union activity compared with domestic students.

In my department, I’m encouraging people to tell parents in their lab about child care benefit and parental leave. (It may be difficult for union to know or maintain those personal information. .e.g. it will be a privacy concern if we keep track of who has kids) Ultimately, we should build a support network – a community where people support each other.

Slide

Organizing for grievance (Union means solidarity)

“Grievances aren’t just about filing paperwork, they are about building and exercising power.”

Here I added an example from UCSD to illustrate why it is important. But not every case works out like this, I added a recent UCSD case to webpage source code.

Slide Slide Slide

Encourage members to organize and become organizers (rank and file activisim, organizing model)

Our Union: More Than Just a Contract

We are in Solidarity with each other!
We can utilize our union resource, and work together to address any workspace issue

We can ask people, What do you want to see change? And here are some examples:

Google drive storage shrink. It started with one person bring it up in a chat, now it is a campus-wide campaign.
Workspace issue. We can send email via union to PI as reminders of our rights. It is important for graudate student workers in the same lab to get together, discuss what to write, and draft it together.
Mental health workshop (2021): It was an workshop about how to access mental health resources by then BIPOC committee. We can add more things: Many International students wish to speak in their native language, we need more therapist who can speak foreign language. We can mention it at the Healthcare input meeting
STEM/non-STEM visa status. STEM visa status can allow international students to stay longer in US after their program (1 year for non-STEM, 3 years for STEM). In some departments, international students tried to push for changing the department status to STEM at the Department of Education

Slide Slide