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TAA Executive Board Response to Graduate Worker “Pay Raise”

TAA UW-Madison Posted on November 12, 2021 Posted in Fair Pay, General, TAA Statements Tagged with fair pay, graduate assistants
The header has the TAA logo and the following text: Graduate Worker Union of UW-Madison | 520 University Avenue, Suite 220, Madison, WI 53703 taa@taa-madison.org | www.taa-madison.org. The statement below reads: November 12, 2021 The University of Wisconsin-Madison Graduate School announced on November 9 that Graduate Workers would receive a 3-4% “raise”, ie., cost-of-living adjustment, for the 2022-23 academic year.1 The fact that the graduate school announced this as if it were a generous gift is an insult to the minds of anyone who knows how to read an excel sheet. Graduate Workers are the backbone of the academic model this campus relies on every single day. Without us the research disappears, the grading stops, the projects come to a grinding halt. Yet time and again we are the ones who get left out of the conversation of our own compensation for the labor we provide. Let’s go through the math. The inflation rate for the first 10 month of 2021 is 6.2%.2 The grad worker raise is 3-4%. This amounts to a 2.1-3.1% pay cut. When inflation is higher than your cost-of-living adjustment, you can buy less with your salary than you could the year before. Combined with grad workers receiving no cost-of-living adjustment or hazard pay last year (when annual inflation was 1.4%), graduate workers are in a more financially precarious situation than ever. Over the last year and a half of the ongoing pandemic, many sacrifices have been made by graduate workers while the UW System gets richer.3 Graduate workers still have not been compensated for the many additional hours of labor they performed moving classes online, putting their lives at risk teaching in person, and spending many additional hours proctoring make-up exams and communicating with sick students. Instead, they are offered this paltry cost-of-living adjustment, while being forced to work in dangerous conditions and made to endure the continued wage theft of segregated fees. This decision against Graduate Workers at this moment can only be seen as a challenge to our dedication to organizing during a period of ongoing attacks from this administration on its own workforce. With the current strike waves and labor uprisings across the United States, it is only reasonable to assume UW Admin is either illiterate or completely out of touch. The TAA calls on all student workers to organize with their fellow student workers, by department or college, around the issues they care about. Only together, through building relationships, can graduate workers build the power necessary to change this university. In solidarity, TAA Executive Board 1 https://grad.wisc.edu/2021/11/09/2022-2023-graduate-assistant-stipend-increase/ 2 https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/ 3 https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2021/10/05/uw-system-funding-reserves-up-189-million/

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Teaching Assistants’ Association
TAA/AFT Local 3220
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