Protest in Fairbanks, led by Alaska Graduate Workers Association

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTVF) - On Monday, April 29, a protest organized by the Alaska Graduate Workers Association (AGWA) took place in both Anchorage and Fairbanks.

In 2020, graduate student employees of the University of Alaska system (UA) began discussions centered around labor issues and they eventually decided to form a union. In 2022 they began their affiliation with the United Auto Workers (UAW), a large, international union. That same year, graduate student workers began the formal process of unionizing. Two years later and after much deliberation, AGWA was formed when a vote to unionize passed.

Since formally unionizing, AGWA has been working to create a contract with the UA system. Those efforts have been ongoing and bargaining units have worked to establish the first contract of it’s kind in Alaska. Like many initial contracts, disagreements between UA and AGWA have held back progress and the courts have gotten involved.

While the union has already displayed their dissatisfaction with a sit-in that occurred in February, a desire to approve a contract and an attempt to strike resulted in a protest during the final week of classes for the spring semester.

With both parties seeking to ratify a contract before the end of the legislative session, bargaining has moved fast having started only about three months ago. According to Jonathan Taylor, the director of public affairs for the UA system, first time contracts take about 450 days to ratify but interest from the AGWA and UA have helped move things along. Still, AGWA remains dissatisfied with the lack of progress and in late March they voted to go on strike.

The qualifications to actually go on strike were not met, however, and UA took the matter to court. In order for the union to go on strike, they would first have to be at an impasse in bargaining and then would need bargaining to be mediated. Only if that mediation failed would they be allowed to strike. In a hearing on the issue that took place at the Rabinowitz Courthouse on April 25, Superior Court Judge Brent Bennett granted a motion for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction, preventing the strike.

Unable to strike and frustrated with a lack of progress with negotiations, AGWA instead organized a protest during which they marched to different areas of the UAF campus (as well as protesting at UAA) chanting about wages, finalizing a contract and the administrations unwillingness to face the union. There are also growing concerns centered around failing to ratify the contract during the current legislative session.

But, according to UA, this is something both parties want to achieve. “We would certainly prefer to get an agreement in time for consideration this legislative session,” said Taylor. That push comes from other negotiations that the university must also address. Even if that does not occur, the UA system seeks to continue bargaining with ongoing sessions planned for the coming weeks.

As to the other issues involved in the contract; pay, healthcare and the at-will employment status of the union workers round out the union’s top three concerns. As for pay, UA “is just bargaining to get $26 [per hour] for masters students [and] $28 for PHD students,” said Isabel Olazar, a graduate student employee at UAF. As she explained however, the union considers this to still be too low because those wages are not competitive with other universities that are similar to UAF. Due to having limited work hours, just 20 hours per week, those wages do not meet the cost of living creating a great deal of hardship for graduate student employees. But that limitation is more so a limitation of pay than it is labor according to some union members. “In reality I work close to 60 hours per week and I’m only paid for 20 hours of that,” said Maxwell Plichta, also a graduate student employee at UAF.

Intertwined with wages is the challenges of finding healthcare. “A lot of university employees have had to travel either out of state or to other cities and they haven’t necessarily been able to afford this travel expense on our salaries,” Olazar said.

Related to that is a lack of support, even for residents from Alaska and it has been a factor that has led some graduate student workers to leave their positions with the UA system. In some cases this has meant changing universities post graduation or leaving for a different program before finishing their degrees. The combined issues have also played a role in whether or not undergraduates decide to stay in the UA system for their graduate studies.

This means that competing universities are capturing graduate students that are also doing research in Alaska. “We are still having to fight with institutes in the lower 48,” said Soumitra Sakhalkar, a graduate student employee at UAF. Sakhalkar works for the Geophysical institute and he said that some students choose to go to schools far away even though they come to Alaska to do research, working alongside UA researchers. According to Sakhalkar, this is because those competing schools offer better pay, better benefits and in some cases even pay for graduate students to relocate.

One of the problems preventing forward progress on those issues is that of the UA budget.

Still, both parties have expressed optimism about establishing a contract before the legislative session comes to an end.

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