Updates

International workers comprise over 40% of the MIT graduate worker body, contributing invaluable work, research, and money for the Institute. Yet, international workers often face additional professional, financial, and legal barriers, compared to domestic peers. With the threat of visa revocation, they are often prone to experiencing some of the most egregious forms of harassment, discrimination, and bullying on our campus. Our union is committed to protecting the rights of our international workers. We are aiming to win a contract with one of the best and most expansive international worker rights clauses in the nation. Already, thanks to the power of collective action, we have seen progress at the table regarding remote work appointments for international workers and ISO responsiveness.

However, there are still two key areas where MIT falls short, even compared to other schools. Namely MIT imposes: 1. unnecessary restrictions on access to internship (CPT) opportunities, and 2. inequitable fees on international workers. As these are two of the most important issues to international graduate workers on campus, it is essential to move MIT on these issues. We describe these issues below. We will also be holding a speakout March 22nd at 12pm outside 105 broadway (exact location TBD) to address these issues.

Dear fellow graduate student workers, 

On Friday, February 17, 2023, members of various campus communities at MIT - the Black Graduate Students Association (BGSA), the Latinx Graduate Student Association (LGSA),  LGBTQ Grad, the DEI Committee of the Graduate Student Council (GSC DEI), and current student alums of the MIT Summer Research Program - sat across the bargaining table from various MIT administrators and lawyers hired to represent MIT. We shared powerful, emotional, and brutally honest statements presenting our own and fellow students’ experiences facing harassment, discrimination, and bullying at MIT. 

To deal with incidents of harassment and discrimination like this, the institute currently presents Institute Harassment and Discrimination Response (IDHR) as the only path for recourse, stating that it is indeed trusted by the grad population. How can this be the case when a survey run by the Association of American Universities reports that 39.4% of grad students reported experiencing harassing behavior, yet less than 1% utilized IDHR? 

The following stories were collected from seven Master’s and/or PhD program alumni who endured severe and prolonged bullying from the same advisor at MIT. Their experiences span 14 years, from when the first of them joined the group to when the last left. All of them suffered deep injury to not only their careers and wellbeing, but also the scientific rigor of their research. By silencing dissent, shutting down inquiry, and demanding that data be massaged to fit pre-existing theories, this advisor and his unchecked abuse directly threaten MIT’s fundamental mission and its reputation for expanding the bounds of human knowledge. These alumni do not share their stories to disparage the Institute, but rather to highlight the failures of current policies in responding to cases of advisor abuse. They implore the MIT administration to listen to grad workers and accept the MIT GSU’s proposed grievance procedure for harassment, discrimination, and bullying. This change would offer grad workers suffering advisor abuse real protection and recourse, thus making MIT a better place for both researchers and research. 

In the following paragraphs, we will refer to the alumni as Alums 1-7. 

A ubiquitous theme in the alumni stories is that the professor, as Alum 5 put it,“rules by fear.” All the alumni report regularly seeing members humiliated in front of the rest of the group. Alum 1 recalled “Once, in front of a bunch of other people in the lab, he scolded me, saying ‘When someone smarter than you tells you to do something, you need to do it!’” Alum 5 remembers “watching him berate some of the research scientists in our group.” But the mistreatment wasn’t just in public — Alum 2 recalled that “My advisor quite often bad-mouthed a student behind his/her back to other students.” Some of the advisor's behavior was so perversely bad that it bordered on surreal. Upon learning Alum 4 was using mental health services to work through the stress of supporting their ailing father, the advisor was incensed and criticized them, saying “You’re sick. How can I work with you when you’re sick? This is why we are not making any progress.”

Nearly 60 years ago, a quarter-million people rallied together for the historic “March on Washington,” where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. What’s sometimes forgotten about the march, though, is that it was actually called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” The demands of the march included an end to segregation and the protection of voting rights, alongside an increase to the federal minimum wage and a federal jobs program to train and employ all unemployed workers. It was understood that ending poverty — with decent wages and full employment — was essential to achieving racial equality in practice.

It’s for this reason that Dr. King was a strong and unwavering proponent of the labor movement and unions as the principal means for workers of all races to fight for improved wages, employment, and working conditions. In fact, he was in Memphis, Tennessee, standing alongside public sanitation workers on strike for equal pay just a day before he was assassinated. And it wasn’t just Dr. King who viewed unions as an integral part of the civil rights movement. Workers did too, organizing in their unions for months to attend the March. And one of the key architects and leaders of the March, A. Philip Randolph, was a longtime labor leader who organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union of primarily Black workers in the railroad industry. Dr. King’s legacy, alongside those of countless other civil rights leaders, exemplifies how the civil rights movement and the labor movement are so deeply intertwined.

Over the past few months, the Graduate Student Union (GSU) Bargaining Committee has participated in multiple sessions of contract negotiations with MIT’s administration. In this time, we have worked through our non-economic proposals and the administration's counterproposals on many of the issues afflicting us as graduate student-workers at the Institute. We have made some important steps already through this process to improve our experience as grad workers here. At the same time, the members of the administration are dragging their feet on a number of key demands. Among these demands is a comprehensive non-discrimination clause and a grievance procedure that empowers us grad workers to address harassment and bullying effectively. We must not let them block these crucial demands.

MIT’s administration is proposing that our grievance procedure, the provision that gives the whole contract teeth, does not apply to any issue of discrimination, bullying, or harassment, including sexual harassment and assault. They also proposed to remove any commitment to promptness with respect to student disability accommodations, restricting the contract to codifying MIT’s existing accommodation policy. This is common throughout the MIT administration's counterproposals, where we see our strong proposal language undermined and chiseled at, reduced to reiterating current standards and policies full of holes.

Graduate student workers at the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program (MIT-WHOI) decided overwhelmingly to unionize when a huge majority of us signed union cards over the last few weeks. After seeing what unionization did for my community growing up, I am confident unionization can be a tool for building a graduate experience of greater stability, security, and support for all of us, regardless of our backgrounds.

I arrived at WHOI as a first-gen student in 2020, 3,000 miles away from my friends and family, in the middle of a global pandemic and a national reckoning with police brutality and institutional racism. As I tried to find my bearings in an unfamiliar environment, feeling isolated and insecure, I came across a statistic on graduate student attrition rates (rates at which students leave the program without a degree) in the earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences (EAPS) department: a shocking 25% average and an incredibly disheartening 42% for under-represented minorities like myself.