Last week, Brown’s Graduate Labor Organization held their first substantive bargaining session with the University, where the organization proposed changes to policies on benefits and academic freedom.
According to GLO’s notes from the session, 220 GLO members attended the Zoom meeting.
“It seems that members are very excited about bargaining,” said Michael Ziegler GS, the president of RIFT-AFT Local 6516 — which represents graduate student employees. “Getting more than 200 people at that first session was something that I honestly didn’t expect.”
Last semester, GLO union stewards conducted in-person surveys with 314 union members to learn what was important to graduate student employees before beginning negotiations with the University, according to Bargaining Co-Chairs Sara Brinton GS and Alejandro Morales GS.
In the surveys, “70% of respondents mentioned concerns with pay, healthcare or other issues related to the cost of living,” Brinton wrote in a message to The Herald.
“The harsh reality is that Providence is the most expensive city relative to average rent and median income, and graduate students do squarely fit that median income,” Morales told The Herald.
According to a Redfin report — which concluded that Providence is the least affordable U.S. city for renters — the 2024 median income in Providence was $50,408, The Herald previously reported. The current base doctoral stipend at Brown is $52,198.
GLO’s survey also found that 63% of students spend around one-third of their pay on housing and 27% spend at least half their pay on housing, according to Brinton.
To combat the affordability issues some graduate student employees face, the bargaining committee plans to negotiate for increased base stipends and childcare benefits.
GLO has proposed to raise the base stipend to $58,462 — a 12% increase — for the fiscal year 2027. The article also included another 11% increase in FY28 and a 10% increase in FY29, according to their “Stipend, Health Care and Other Benefits” proposal presentation.
Additionally, the article proposes to raise the childcare stipend up to $9,000 for every child under the age of six, and up to $6,000 for each child aged seven to 18. Currently, doctoral student and master’s of fine arts student parents receive at most $6,000 for up to three children under six-years-old and up to $3,000 for children seven to 13-years-old.
The “most ambitious” article GLO is proposing is the option to allow graduate students to participate in Brown’s 403(b) Retirement Plan, which is offered to most other Brown employees, Morales said.
“We just want to be included in that so that sacrificing your 20s and 30s or later years that you could be contributing to your finances doesn’t have to be such a big opportunity cost,” he added.
Retirement plans are currently offered to graduate students at institutions like Columbia and Dartmouth, according to the presentation.
Beyond payment and benefits, the bargaining committee also proposed a new academic freedom article, which will codify “in the contract our freedom to teach according to our expertise and to have freedom of political expression both inside and outside of the workplace,” Ziegler wrote in a message to The Herald.
Ziegler added that the artificial intelligence clause of the proposed academic freedom article will ensure that the University communicates changes to AI policies that will affect the work of graduate students.
The postdoctoral workers union negotiated for an academic freedom article in their last contract, which Ziegler said will serve as a “starting point” for GLO’s proposal. Because the University agreed to this article for postdocs, Ziegler said he feels “pretty good about our ability to have that codified in this contract.”
Emily Feil is a university news and metro editor covering staff & student labor and RISD. She is from Long Beach, NY and plans to concentrate in English and international & public affairs. In her free time, she can be found watching bad TV and reading good books.
