Campaigns and Statements

Our largest campaign revolves around a living wage for campus and graduate workers at UNC, achieved through a union-negotiated contract with the university. Such contracts are common at other peer institutions, such as University of Michigan. In NC, state policy forbids such a contract and that policy must be abolished!

At UNC, 78% of graduate workers are paid less than the living wage of $24,600 for a single adult in Orange County, NC. The University is our main employment option for the 5+ years that we work to earn our degree – that means while we must compete with each other to sell our labor, the University does not have to compete with anybody to buy it! The University uses this position of power to pay us far less than we can live off of. We are forced to take out loans, use consumer credit for routine living expenses, take on multiple roommates, and indefinitely postpone important life events because of costs. As many Universities across the United States are calling for, we need a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA).

Campus workers, including housekeepers, maintenance workers, and staff, deserve a living wage!

Last we checked our teeth are in our bodies, yet dental coverage is not available to Graduate workers who use UNC’s healthcare! UNC’s suggested individual dental plans are unaffordable and offer little coverage. Many are forced to either avoid dental care entirely or take out private loans to cover emergency medical services. The same goes for vision and mental health coverage.

Similarly, dental coverage and health insurance for UNC’s campus workers are unreasonably expensive, offer little coverage, and often serve workers at inconveniently distant hospitals. Campus workers should have affordable coverage than can cover themselves and serve their families’ needs. We seek to have all workers at UNC earning a living wage and necessary benefits.

ALL workers deserve a workplace and an employer that strives to keep them free of bodily and mental harm.

The recent discovery of substantial lead contamination in UNC’s water supply and the subsequent PR campaign to downplay it shows that UNC prioritizes saving face over ethical treatment of its workers.

We also seek to build a safe working environment with clear grievance procedures that work for all workers. Grievance procedures for campus workers are notoriously complicated and must be completed within 15 days of an incident. Further, the necessary forms have not been translated into any language except English, despite 40% of housekeepers speaking English as a second language. These problems combine to seriously hurt workers’ ability to remedy dangerous workplace conditions and keep themselves safe from abuse.

There exists no formal grievance policy for graduate workers, other than the narrow federal provisions of Title IX, and UNC’s undergraduate procedures. As graduate students, our relationship with faculty is different from an undergraduate’s relationship with faculty, so our protections should be different too! Without a formal grievance procedure, grad students are often given no choice but to present grievances to the very people within their department with whom they have had a problem.

The Workers’ Union at UNC has seen the continued privatization of University units and believes that these processes harm all of us. Just as the privatization of the student stores negatively impacted workers on campus, the planned privatization projects at UNC recently proposed by the administration will harm workers in all sectors at UNC. We oppose the privatization of departments, programs, and services on our campus.

More broadly we take a moral stance that the University is a public good, and should be used to the benefit of the community as a whole. We oppose the preservation of symbols of hate; the use of the University as a platform for hate speech by racists and fascists; and the use of UNC police as a tool of oppression against the community. These acts are an injury to the public good! See our UE’s statements on All Workers Must Stand Against Police Violence and Bold and Concrete Action to End the Killing of Black People

We seek to preserve the University as a public good, and to push it to serve the public good. Further, we demand UNC hires campus workers as direct employees and end the outsourcing of campus labor to private contractors. Pay us a living wage!

Pay-to-work policies are immoral and deceptive!

The University continues to impose parking fees on workers, who must pay to park on campus or park at another facility and drive their work vehicles to campus. These fees are scheduled to increase over the next three years. We believe that parking fee increases unfairly chip away at the flat-rate raises for campus workers for which UE fought in the state legislature. This issue is even more concerning in the current COVID-19 pandemic, when public transportation is limited or unsafe.