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As students flooded back onto the University of Rochester campuses last week, graduate students received notice of a new universitywide minimum stipend for doctoral students.
The move follows a year of pressure from the Graduate Labor Union, resulting in a strike at the end of the 2024-2025 academic year.
Publicized by the Graduate Labor Union on social media, the stipend is now $25,000 for a nine-month appointment and $35,000 for a 12-month appointment. For 2025, the required livable wage before taxes in Rochester is $47,488 as calculated by the Living Wage Institute.
“This is a pretty transformative stipend increase for a lot of (students). It’s not a huge percentage of the overall grad population at the university, but some Eastman (School of Music) grads made as little as $10,000 before this,” says George Elkind, a fourth-year graduate worker and GLU organizer. “Some of them are seeing a $15,000 wage increase. That’s a huge impact on their quality of life. It’s coming at a time when there are many, many cuts being implemented across universities.”
In 2022, graduate workers were guaranteed health insurance for full-time students and a child care subsidiary pilot— initiatives advocated by the Graduate Labor Union, known as the Graduate Student Collective at the time.
“A recent stipend update marks another step in implementing the university’s longstanding plans to enhance our graduate programs,” says UR spokesperson Sara Miller. “This stipend increase is in line with adjustments in recent years to expand support for our full-time PhD students.”
In the 2024-2025 school year, UR had 5,366 total enrolled graduate students.
Elkind views these updates as an outcome of organizing and a way of buying out workers, assuaging discontent. For the GLU, the fight isn’t over. Students continue to ask for formal recognition of the union through a private election agreement, which the university rejected in May.
“The students continue to have access to the National Labor Relations Board-supervised election process, which is the path used by all other existing unions at the university,” Miller says. “The NLRB is actively conducting union representation elections across the country.”
The next step for GLU is expanding forms of mutual aid and support on campus for what are ultimately workplace issues. The union has supported Rebecca Bryant Novak’s campaign, for example, after Bryant Novak’s expulsion from the Eastman School.
“We don’t have a formally recognized union just yet, but our position is that that doesn’t keep us from advocating for grad workers now,” Elkind says.
Emmely Eli Texcucano is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and member of the Oasis Project’s second cohort.
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This story leaves out critical context, namely that the first Trump Administration tried to void unions for teaching assistants, research assistants, graduate assistants, and graduate research assistants, and through their illegal actions to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and take it over during this administration is hoping to do so again, amongst other anti worker actions. The University of Rochester spokesperson continues to issue misleading statements, not mentioning that graduate workers have been recognized by Universities across the country without being forced by the federal government to do so. While the University of Rochester sues the Trump administration for its illegal actions against their medical research grants, they seem perfectly content to allow illegal actions at the NLRB to silence the voice of their graduate workers and rights to form a union for the many services they perform for the University. Until Trump won the election they had made every indication they were happy to proceed with a private agreement with the union. Afterwards, they made indications they would sue them if they attempted to file with the NLRB, and potentially endanger thousands of unions nationwide. The University of Rochester is saying here they will not respect basic rights of their students and workers unless explicitly forced to by the federal government, a despicable position for an institution that claims to uphold Meliora values.