While the living wage in Austin is estimated to be $51,074 (including taxes), the minimum stipend for graduate workers at UT remains at $2,080/month—amounting to just $18,720 over nine months of guaranteed employment. As a union, we will work to secure year-round employment for everyone and raise the minimum stipend to match this city’s cost of living, so that graduate workers across all departments and colleges are able to thrive.

Graduate workers at comparable universities, both private and public, earn more than those at UT, even in areas with a lower cost of living. We will fight for a fair wage, knowing that the University is not only ethically obligated to but also perfectly capable of giving us one.

Graduate workers keep the University running. We teach students, conduct high-quality research, attract faculty, and strengthen UT’s reputation. Our labor sustains the very funding that keeps the University running. Yet UT invests very little in their graduate students—in fact, less than 1% of this year’s budget of $4.5 billion is being spent on TAs.

UT has no excuse for underfunding their graduate workers. Instead of paying us a fair wage, University leadership has chosen to dedicate funds to advance their political agenda; in May 2025 they announced an investment of $100 million into a brand-new building for the School of Civic Leadership, a department recently created by conservative lawmakers and donors to promote “Western Civilization… and economic liberty”. This is an irresponsible use of money, and one that does not reflect the desires and needs of the University’s students or the wider community.

Furthermore, the distribution of funding for graduate workers across various departments is highly inequitable; while graduate workers in the Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Graduate Program are guaranteed over $3,300/month and year-round employment, TAs in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese receive under $2,200/month and only nine months of guaranteed employment, leaving many without support over the summer. It’s time for the University to start paying us honestly and fairly, instead of the minimum it can get away with.

Currently, the financial security of UT’s graduate workers is heavily dependent on market trends and the preferences of those in political and economic power. We believe the University should do everything in their power to provide well-funded graduate worker positions to scholars of every field. This consists of not only raising the minimum stipend but also allocating more resources to historically undervalued, underfunded, and underresearched disciplines.

Many teaching assistants and assistant instructors are expected to work long hours while still fulfilling substantial research duties—or risk getting fired. UT does not offer overtime pay for any work beyond 20 hours per week, even though in practice, TAs and AIs often do so. TAs and AIs juggle numerous responsibilities including grading, teaching, answering questions offline, and holding office hours, at times serving over 90 students each. This already heavy workload, when combined with research responsibilities, creates stress, erodes work-life balance, and often leads to burnout. We will work to address these issues by establishing stringent work limits, advocating for greater funding to create additional TA positions, and providing overtime pay as a last resort, ensuring that workloads are distributed fairly and that every worker is treated with respect.

Some researchers spend long, irregular hours in the lab without fair compensation, while others are forced to work in unsafe environments, a reality that many experienced firsthand during the Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, GRAs face a severe power imbalance in their relationship with their advisors, who are simultaneously responsible for a GRA’s funding as well as their career advancement. This unchecked power leaves GRAs vulnerable to exploitation, abuse, and/or retaliation, and individual workers often have no way of fighting back. This lies at the heart of what makes our union so important; it demonstrates that an injustice against one graduate student is an injustice against all of us. We will advocate for proper safety measures, formal union grievance mechanisms, and clearly defined degree requirements, to ensure that all of UT’s researchers are protected.

The minimum wage in Austin is tied to the state and federal minimum of $7.25/hr, amounting to $15,080 a year. While the City of Austin uses a living wage calculation to determine wages for government employees (resulting in a minimum of $21.63/hr), the University of Texas at Austin does not follow the same metric. UT guarantees its graduate workers only $19,566 over nine months, far below the city’s nine-month living wage of $33,742.80.

According to the University, there is nothing wrong with this. After all, UT follows the custom of universities across the US by nominally declaring us part-time students, part-time employees, working 20 hours a week. We graduate workers know that this claim cannot be further from the truth. Not only are classes a part of our employment contract, but our advisors will hold us responsible—with threat of termination—if we don’t spend 40 hours a week contributing, either directly (through teaching and researching) or indirectly (through taking classes), to the essential functions of our employment and for the benefit of the University. We will not let the University devalue our academic labor; we can and should be paid a living wage, as all full-time employees deserve. Although state law currently prevents cities from raising the minimum wage, we can begin the fight for everyone to receive a living wage here, with our fellow workers at UT.

UT continues to invest in weapon manufacturing and technology corporations that continue to supply militaries with the weapons and technologies necessary to commit war crimes and human rights abuses. We denounce this entirely, and we maintain our position that the University should never prioritize their own profit ahead of human lives. Furthermore, the University has made recent plans that threaten to not only limit the academic freedom of students and professors on campus, but also contribute to a nationwide erasure of the struggles that disadvantaged groups have faced historically and in the modern day. We as a union will fight so that UT upholds moral standards not only within the school but also in its decisions that affect the rest of the world.

Here at UT, students have been suspended for exercising free speech, TAs fired for sharing resources, and international graduate students’ visas revoked without clear reason. Restrictions on free speech are expected to intensify under recent policies such as Senate Bill 2972, and international students face an increasingly hostile environment where minor infractions such as traffic stops are being weaponized for visa revocation. As a union, we will stand firmly with and, if possible, provide legal support for workers in these situations, advocating for their rights and ensuring that nobody faces retaliation for speaking out or simply being in the US.

We strive for all graduate workers to be represented in the University’s decision-making processes, so that the benefits of our labor are distributed fairly and ethically. We generate significant value for the University, and we deserve a say not only in how these economic resources are allocated, but also in how we are treated in the workplace.

We are a democratic organization and all members are free to speak up and propose ideas at our meetings. We cultivate a space where every voice is heard and valued, and we take collective action on decisions that are made democratically. Our work consists of building a powerful base of workers that will ensure that the voice of graduate student workers at UT cannot be ignored.

In 2020, UT graduate students distributed a petition and held a demonstration, winning various demands such as a 65% reduction in summer tuition for graduate students and the allocation of $1.2-1.5 million for the creation of additional short-term academic job positions (e.g. TAs, AIs, and post-docs). We will continue to employ similar strategies—email campaigns, petitions, grade-ins, teach-ins, protests, rallies, etc—to make our voice heard and try to persuade the University to address our grievances without having to disrupt the University’s core functions. These methods have brought some success in the past, and we hope they will continue to bring success in the future.

For the most part, the University has been unreceptive to the demands of graduate workers, including our key request for higher stipends. The threat and/or execution of a strike is more likely to compel the University to address our concerns than simply asking. For example, after a failure in collective bargaining, graduate workers at the UC system went on strike; after six weeks, they won a huge stipend increase from $23,250 to $34,000, as well as $2,025 in child-care reimbursements per semester. The disruptive power of a university-wide strike is crucial to making sure workers receive fair pay and protections, particularly in today’s hostile political climate, where workers’ rights are under constant threat of being ignored or even stripped away.

Graduate schools tend to favor students who come from upper-middle class backgrounds, who can afford to go unpaid over the summer and can rely on family support for large purchases or emergencies. This persistent inequity shows that universities across the US are not providing sufficient support for students of all backgrounds to thrive. We believe not only that every student deserves an opportunity to attend graduate school, but also that the University would benefit greatly from the broad range of perspectives they would bring.

With UT’s meager pay, the families of graduate students who are single parents are left under the federal poverty line. According to the US Department of Labor, childcare for infants and toddlers in Travis County costs over $11,000 annually—over half the minimum stipend UT is offering its graduate workers. Not only will we fight for better wages, but we will also fight to support these particularly economically vulnerable workers with childcare stipends and paid parental leave (which UT currently lacks, unlike many peer universities such as UIUC and UMich). Similarly, we will fight for legal counseling and additional financial support for undocumented workers, and improved protections for graduate workers with disabilities. As one of the wealthiest universities in the world, UT needs to care for its students better, and we will do everything in our power to make sure that they do.

Trump’s recent compact proposed to UT threatens academic freedom, erases LGBTQ+ experiences, and further encourages the crackdown on free speech happening on the University campus. UT’s leadership has responded eagerly, offering to audit gender studies coursework to align with “applicable law and state and federal guidance” (which explicitly ban teaching about transgender and non-binary identities), and planning to eliminate the women’s studies department and consolidate the Black and Latino studies departments (effectively reducing their funding and autonomy). Historically, all of these fields were created through student activism, and in the present day, we are building the capacity to produce the activism necessary to defend, and if necessary, reinstate, these disciplines and programs.