Just How Far Apart Are TUGSA and Temple?

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WRITTEN BY: Jadon George

When collective bargaining disputes between workers and employers burst into the open, they usually follow a similar pattern: The company offers its employees an agreement that gets struck down as impossibly low. In turn, labor puts forward a deal that capital decries as absurdly high. After several rounds of counteroffers and concessions, the two sides agree to meet somewhere in the middle.

As the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association enters its third day of striking, the union that represents Temple University’s teaching assistants and the administration of Philadelphia’s largest university appear to be on different planets.

The differences started when the graduate students’ union first tried to assume its role in negotiations. When TUGSA first informed university administrators that they would be representing the TAs and instructors in contract talks, union representatives say that Temple slow-walked the process.

“We initially told them we intended to bargain the September before the last one,” said Monasa Gopukamar, who served as TUGSA’s president during the 2021-22 academic year and sat on their team of negotiators. “It took them a long time to get us the documents we needed to get started with the process.” Gopakumar said. They didn’t get them until January 2022.

“We’ve been negotiating for over a year now and Temple has essentially not moved hardly at all from the table,” said Beth Kosmicki, another negotiator and former TUGSA president.

From all appearances, the university didn’t take the union’s position into consideration when it offered to increase graduate students’ pay by 3% over four years, or roughly $627.54 per year, a figure reflected in an email signed by provost Gregory H. Mandel and COO Ken Kaiser and sent to students on Tuesday.
According to Kosmicki, TUGSA asked for a 62.5% one-time raise from roughly $20,000 to $32,000. MIT’s Living Wage Calculator estimates that it costs $37,169 per year to cover living expenses, housing costs and taxes in the city of Philadelphia. Living cost was the leading consideration for TUGSA, Kosmicki said, when she told administrators that their offer “just won’t work for our members.” (For their part, Temple administrators said their own offer, which included the stipend, a one-time $500 payment, and paid health insurance, at $40,000.)

Temple isn’t the only university to enter a labor dispute in the past several months, and the graduate students aren’t the only Temple employees to launch a high-stakes bargaining fight with administrators. In December , graduate students in the University of California system struck to bring their pay level with the Golden State’s cost of living. In that case, hundreds of tenured and tenure-track professors joined 48,000 academic workers on the picket line, and UC agreed to a raise in pay and benefits after a six-week stoppage of research and instruction.

In October, nurses in Temple’s health system threatened to strike amid a spike in violence against medical service workers. Only when the university agreed to upgrade security at its hospitals and clinics did both sides manage to smooth things over.

On Dec. 12, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it would raise its minimum stipend for Ph.D. candidates to $38,000 from its previous position of $30,547, the largest one-time stipend increase in the history of Philadelphia’s lone Ivy League school. (In the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Kosmicki quoted Temple’s administrators as responding, “We’re not Penn.”)

By all indications, both sides of the TUGSA strike appear far more willing to risk an extended strike than in these cases. For classes where TAs serve as primary instructors, Temple has vowed to continue classes as scheduled by hiring replacements.

“If a graduate student instructor chooses to strike, the university will assign alternative instructors,” wrote provost Gregory M. Mandel and university COO Ken Kaiser in the email mentioned above.

At the College of Liberal Arts, administrators called on students to report absent instructors to the university so that the replacement instructors could take over.

An email authored in the first person by TUGSA and circulated to students by TAs and instructors decried the move as a decision that would lower the quality of classroom instruction.

“I am the teacher and researcher hired to teach this class for a reason and my last minute replacement will only be able to do the bare minimum, far less than you deserve,” the group wrote.

“If this goes on for a long time,” it’s going to affect the university in very serious ways — in terms of its enrollment, in terms of its reputation, in terms of all of those things,” Gopakumar said.