BREAKING NEWS: Today, Monday December 11th, OrganizeUW filed an application to certify our union at the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB)! Well over 40% of graduate TAs & RAs at UWaterloo have signed union cards, clearly showing that workers throughout the university demand a union.
Policy 30 - the policy that outlines the terms of employment for TAs - was updated as of December 13, 2022. We want to explain some of the issues we see with Policy 30 - both the process and the content - and how it would be different if we were already unionized.
BREAKING NEWS: The OrganizeUW Sessionals’ union campaign has filed an application to certify our union at the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB)! We've exceeded the requirement of 40% of Sessional Instructors signing union cards, demonstrating loud and clear that Sessionals at the University of Waterloo want to form a union!
On January 20th, an email was sent out to the UW Employees contact list by Vivek Goel, President and Vice-Chancellor, and James W. E. Rush, Vice-President, Academic and Provost, to provide employees the chance to give feedback on the February return to campus plan. In text, the email was addressed to the UW Community. Didn't get that email as a graduate student worker (i.e., TA or RA)? Guess you aren’t considered a UW Employee.
Campus organizations continue to pass resolutions to endorse the grassroots campaign to unionize graduate student and sessional workers at the University of Waterloo. Read on to learn more about who has supported us and how we're teaming up to spread the word across campus!
OrganizeUW is concerned that international doctoral students are facing significant and unexpected reductions to their funding packages in their fourth year due to fine print, unclear offer letters, and apparent departmental funding shortfalls.
OrganizeUW is concerned that the uWaterloo administration is not communicating relevant health and safety information to graduate student workers and sessional instructors.
Sara, a student organizer, was recently interviewed by Ariel Deutschmann from KitchenerToday.com, for her article ["Graduate students from UW plan to unionize"](https://www.kitchenertoday.com/local-news/graduate-students-from-uw-plan-to-unionize-2693305). They chatted about digital organizing during a pandemic, our goal to improve working and learning conditions at UW, and how unionization works. This blog post not only includes some snippets from the full KT article, but also has the latest updates from the drive, some thoughts on being an organizer, and a preview of what's to come in the Fall semester.