OrganizeUW News

Three graduate student organizers just published an Op-Ed in Imprint, the UWaterloo student newspaper, in which they discuss an important question: ‘Does UW have a Teaching Assistant problem?’ (Spoiler alert - the answer is yes). click here to read an excerpt and the link to the full opinion piece!

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.

An editorial by OrganizeUW volunteer Nolan Shaw in Imprint, Waterloo's campus newspaper, describes the impacts of anti-labor legislation on sessionals and student workers - and what we can do to resist these anti-worker and undemocratic actions.

This article in Passage shows why we need a union in Waterloo! Volunteer worker organizers describe the conditions that inspired OrganizeUW, the challenges - and the creative solutions - around organizing during remote learning, and the catastrophic impacts the pandemic has had on student workers and sessional instructors.

Who is OrganizeUW? What happens once TAs, RAs, and sessionals unionize? Could student-faculty relationships be impacted? How can faculty best offer support? As a prof, lecturer, or other faculty member, you may be wondering what unionization would look like at UW and how it could impact you. In our new guest post on the FAUW Blog we work to directly address such questions and concerns. We also list some easy ways you can help, including spreading the word and filling in our quick form to register your support. Click here for the link to the full post!

Protecting the health and safety of all attendees, organizers, and the broader community is of the utmost importance to OrganizeUW. While our union drive has been almost entirely digital for over a year, we have slowly begun holding more in-person events as public health restrictions allow and best practices shift. This post outlines the current safety procedures in place for organizers and visitors at all in-person events, in accordance with current local and provincial public health restrictions. Please take note of these measures when planning your visit!

The next blog post in our ongoing series tackles the issue of unfair pay practices. This spring, UW announced a TA pay raise from $33.89 to $45/hour. But because it engages in scholarship clawbacks to offset such increases, as a grad TAs you will very likely see zero increase, or even a slight reduction, in your take home pay. But did you know that grads at other universities get to keep their scholarship pay regardless of their work? So #WhyNotWaterloo? This unfair, exploitative, and potentially illegal practice doesn’t happen where TAs have a union. Read on to learn more and find out how you can take action to protect your pay raise from university clawbacks.

OrganizeUW calls out the University of Waterloo with new survey data suggesting graduate students are doing much worse now than before the start of the pandemic

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!

UW recently offered a two-day “scheduled pause” to encourage wellness during the pandemic, which made us curious - were you actually able to take some much-needed time off? And have you generally felt well-supported by UW during COVID-19? What do you think UW should be doing to support graduate students, that they're not? Please take our anonymous 5-minute survey and let us know!