Rochester’s international student workers fight for union rights

At the University of Rochester (UR), New York, Ph.D. candidate Jefferson Leal conducts surveys and analyses the rhetoric of elected officials, aiming to understand how political speech impacts vaccination rates.

As an international student worker from Brazil, some routine parts of Leal’s life proved to be a challenge during his first year in Rochester, he said. Depending on the work that graduate students do, some don’t receive a W-2 form for tax filing. Leal didn’t get a W-2 form, which, as a non-US citizen, made it difficult to secure a Social Security number. That led to a domino effect of other issues, including with getting a credit card and building a credit score to secure an apartment. 

Leal remembers having to rely on credit and debit cards from Brazil during his first year in Rochester, which meant dealing with exchange rates. He also remembers how grateful he was when he finally found a landlord who understood his situation.

“When I said I don’t have a Social Security number, I don’t have a credit score, many of them would just shut the conversation. It made the search process much harder,” he said. 

Leal finally secured a Social Security number over his first summer, after taking on a research role with a W-2 classification, but said other students struggle with the same issues he faced. As a member of student government, Leal has been pushing the university to put all student workers on a W-2 payroll like some other colleges do – but it’s been to no avail. The university declined to comment on the matter.

Issues like these, Leal said, have driven many international students to advocate for unionising.

“We have been putting effort into advocacy for years and there’s so little that we’ve been given without a union,” he said.

UR graduate student workers are seeking to unionise to push for higher stipend payments for their research and teaching roles, and more childcare support. They’re also seeking some benefits specific to international students – who make up over half of the university’s graduate student workforce.

With a new school year underway, student workers are continuing to push for an election on whether to unionise. The organising efforts come amid a political climate where higher education and international students have been in the spotlight.

President Trump’s administration hasn’t directly targeted UR like it has Harvard, Columbia, and others, but the university is still feeling the impacts of federal policy.

The university has seen around $10 million in cuts to research funding so far this year. In addition, some international students lost legal status during April’s mass termination of Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) records. Those students have since had their records restored.

UR has pushed back by joining lawsuits aiming to stop the administration from capping funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. In addition, the university provided resources to students worried about their immigration status during the mass terminations.

We have been putting effort into advocacy for years and there’s so little that we’ve been given without a union

Leal Jefferson, UR PhD candidate

The UR Graduate Labor Union has said it’s seeking to give students a voice as the university navigates the administration. Graduate students have unionised at dozens of universities ever since a 2016 National Labor Relations Board ruling allowed Columbia students to do so.

Currently, Columbia students are engaged in contract negotiations. Among their demands is prohibiting the university from sharing international students’ private information with federal agencies unless required by law. 

However, union bargaining has its limits. Columbia administration filed an unfair labour practice in August, alleging the union is bargaining over matters unrelated to student employment – such as demanding that the university be designated as an immigration “sanctuary space”.

Beyond federal policy, UR international students who The PIE News spoke with said they want more support with filing taxes, higher stipends, and help during financial emergencies. 

Toothache sparks union support

For international students, a monthly stipend is typically their only source of income. That’s because, unlike US citizens, federal rules prevent them from getting an additional job outside of campus and they can’t qualify for federal loans.

Balancing the cost of housing, food, and other expenses can be a challenge on a stipend alone, said Yasser Abdelshafy – a Ph.D. candidate from Egypt working to model the impacts of the earth’s early magnetic field. He said he sometimes must choose between visiting his family overseas and saving for emergencies.

During insurance enrolment one year, Abdelshafy decided against a $300 payment for dental insurance. That helped to cover the cost of his trip to visit his family, but soon, he developed a toothache that didn’t show any signs of going away. Back then, Abdelshafy’s stipend was $34,000 a year. Rochester’s living wage, according to MIT, is around $47,000 annually without any children. UR has not responded to The PIE about its research wages.

“As a graduate student, you’re always short on cash so you never have $300 to spare,” he said.

Abdelshafy’s friend, a dentist, gave him treatment at no cost, but he says other international students facing similar emergencies may not be as lucky. He’s hoping for higher stipends and an emergency healthcare support fund, similar to what Syracuse University student workers secured in their first-ever union contract.

Two years ago, Syracuse students reached a deal that included a nearly 24% raise in stipends and a gradual minimum stipend increase, set to reach $30,000 by 2027. It also included five days of paid leave for immigration proceedings and a reimbursement of federal visa processing fees.

At UR, the minimum stipend for Ph.D. workers rose to $25,000 this semester. The UR Graduate Labor Union said its advocacy work pushed the university to make the change, writing on social media that some workers previously made $10,000 annually. 

However, unlike Syracuse, UR students don’t have legally-binding bargaining power since there’s been no union election. UR students will likely have a more difficult path to an election compared to Syracuse students, who unionised under the Biden administration.

During his first term, President Trump tried to exclude student workers from unionising, a proposal the NLRB later threw out under Biden. Now, the five-member NLRB currently has three vacant positions that Trump can fill.

UR union organisers worry that, if they ask the NLRB for an election and Trump fills those positions, the board would revisit the case of whether student workers can unionise. Last spring semester, the union held a weeks-long strike to pressure the university, rather than the NLRB, to host an election.

In a statement, UR said a private election agreement would be unprecedented, since all current unions representing university employees were made official through a vote the NLRB oversaw. The students “continue to have – and have always had – access to the NLRB’s supervised election process”, according to the university.

Call for more tax support 

UR students have stepped up their calls for a union since 2022, when a student group surveyed nearly 500 Ph.D. candidates and found that many struggled financially. Nearly a quarter of students reported using a food pantry or skipping a meal at least once. Some 10% reported being unable to afford full rent and 46% reported skipping out seeing a doctor because of the cost.

Azmeer Sharipol, a Ph.D. candidate from Malaysia, helped with that survey. Sharipol is working to find better treatments for acute myeloid leukemia, a blood cancer that kills a third of the people diagnosed with it within five years. The union, he says, has brought together the next generation of researchers in science, history, philosophy, music, and other disciplines over common challenges. 

“We are no longer doing it for ourselves,” he said. “We are doing it because we want the University of Rochester to be better for future students.”

Sharipol hopes that unionising can push UR to provide subsidised federal and state tax preparation programs for student workers, which Syracuse students secured in their contract.

When Sharipol worked as an hourly-paid lab technician at UR before starting his Ph.D. program, he filed taxes by submitting his W-2 form detailing how much money his employer withheld. 

But now, filing taxes is a lot more complicated, he said. He needs to make quarterly payments to the IRS. For other international students, the process looks different – because many countries have unique income tax treaties with the US. 

Every year, international students go through the same struggles in understanding the tax system, Sharipol said. In his first year, Sharipol didn’t understand the tax filing process, so he didn’t set aside money for his quarterly payments.

“I had to pay for taxes for the previous year and then I was helping out my family and obviously the living costs during that time. It was all compounded,” he said

When he first came to Rochester, H.A. – a Ph.D. candidate who only wanted his initials to be used for his privacy – remembers that fellow international students from India helped him to file taxes. Their process was similar because they shared the same tax treaty. H.A. said he couldn’t imagine filing taxes if he were the only student of his country on campus.

“I was able to go to them because they came from the same country as I did… But many students don’t have that privilege,” he said.

A UR spokesperson declined to comment on tax support services for international students. However, on its website, the UR International Services Office says it partners with Sprintax, a software specific to non-resident students. The software helps with filing federal and state taxes, but state filing isn’t free, according to the website.

Systemic issues

H.A. hopes that unionising makes students realise that they’re not alone in their challenges, he said. At the end of his first year in Rochester, he saved enough to buy a used car to help with shopping for groceries and other essentials – only to sell it after he couldn’t afford to maintain it. H.A. said he’s known many international students who’ve faced similar struggles with the cost of living.

“I see students using food pantries ever more often,” he said.

The union has already started to unite graduate students across nationalities and disciplines, Leal said, to find solutions. Now, he hopes those ideas could one day make to the bargaining table.

“Many grad workers suffer alone,” he said. “They think what’s happening to them is just a localisation, an exception. Then, when you’re part of a union, you start talking to other people and realise, no, these are systemic issues.”

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