Issues

A Living Wage for All 

For many Vanderbilt graduate workers, their stipends barely cover the necessities. Food, housing, and transportation are not luxuries, and yet grad workers routinely face food insecurity, fail to make rent, and lack reliable means to get to and from campus. Graduate workers deserve pay commensurate with the rising cost of living, not poverty wages.

Fairness and Protections for international student workers

International students’ needs are often overlooked and their labor exploited by the university. International graduate student workers must contend with added expenses related to relocation, travel, visa applications, and taxes; they are also subject to threats to their status and safety by the university, local police, and federal authorities. International workers deserve support for visa fees, paid leave for immigration-related travel, and other resources that Vanderbilt currently fails to provide.

Comprehensive benefits

Fully-covered medical, vision, and dental insurance are the bare minimum of what the university can offer us and our dependents. We currently lack paid short-term and long-term medical and parental leave, childcare subsidies, and specific provisions and protections for disabled grad workers and those seeking gender-affirming care.

Equitable Working Conditions 

To successfully do our work, we must have adequate workplace protections. This includes access to necessary safety equipment in labs, classrooms, and offices, accommodations for disabled grad workers, standard grievance and reporting procedures against sexual harassment and other forms of workplace misconduct, protection from bullying and abuse, and protection from retaliation by supervisors. Graduate students in all programs deserve clear PTO and parental leave policies. 

A voice in university policies and procedures

Vanderbilt management—including the chancellor and board of trustees—regularly make decisions that impact us as graduate student workers. We must be allowed input in these decisions to ensure we are treated fairly and equitably by the university. Our work sustains the university, and we are simply asking Vanderbilt management to sustain us in return. Forming a union will enable us to have not just a collective voice, but a collective impact when it comes to decisions about graduate housing and campus life.