OrganizeUW News

Thousands of migrant student workers face deportation if work permits are not made renewable immediately. Tomorrow, Nov. 24, 2020, students from Migrant Students United are holding a Day of Action to demand: renewable work permits, real access to PR, lower tuition & universal services, all work to be valued, family unity, and status for all. Actions include a petition, rally (Covid-safe), calling the Immigration Minister, and a TweetStorm. Grassroots student organizers of OrganizeUW stand in solidarity with the students of MSU. Please consider taking action to support international and migrant students, who are a vital part of our community at UW and in Canada as a whole.

Despite the fact that international students make up over 50% of full-time equivalent graduate students in some faculties at UW, they are often ignored when the university makes decisions about policy. This is the third post by our international student sub-committee in their series on how a union can help make international students’ experiences at UW better.

International students make up nearly half of graduate students yet they are often neglected when the university crafts policy. This is the second post in the series by our international student sub-committee, in which they considers how a union can help ensure international student issues get the attention they deserve.

International students comprise nearly half of graduate students yet they are often neglected when the university crafts policy. In this new series of short posts, our international student sub-committee considers how a union can help bring the issues they experience to the forefront. Click here to read the full article!

Our new series considers the question of what difference does a union really make? In other words, how does working as a TA, RA or Sessional at UW compare to other schools? What concrete results has unionization brought elsewhere? In our first post we examine TA wages and hours. Did you know that graduate TAs at other Ontario universities earn 25-35% more per hour AND work 12-25% fewer hours per course? But #WhyNotWaterloo? Read on to find out more.

OrganizeUW was featured recently on Episode 62 - “Grad Union, COVID Tracing, America Votes” of Beyond the Bulletin, UW's weekly campus affairs podcast, including an interview with a student organizer and discussion of the OrganizeUW campaign! The Interview begin at about ~9:30, but please check out the whole episode!

Come by Waterloo park and grab an OrganizeUW mask, talk to a couple of grad student organizers (socially distanced, of course), and sign a union card if you'd like to but haven't already!

Not every goose on the UWaterloo campus is this clever. Our goose knows that TAs, RAs, and Instructors need a strong voice for fairness, better working conditions, and safety on campus. That’s why hundreds have decided to join the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE).

Mandarin translation of the steps we have to go through to get a union for academic workers at uWaterloo.

Sara, a student organizer, was recently interviewed by Ariel Deutschmann from KitchenerToday.com, for her article “Graduate students from UW plan to unionize”. 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.