As we noted last week, graduate student workers at Boston University (BU) have gone on strike to demand increased stipends and improved benefits.

The University states:

Our graduate student workers have the right to strike, but the University also has a legal right to withhold compensation from striking employees for the days they are on strike. The University intends to withhold pay from any graduate student workers who are on strike for the duration of the strike period. 

Only graduate students who attest to working will be paid. Those who fail to attest to working, or attest that they did not work, are not being paid starting this week. Today (Friday April 5th) was their pay day and I am informed that they were not paid

A source at BU writes:

Many of our philosophy graduate students are (barely) living paycheck to paycheck, and they could use the profession’s support. If you’d like to support them, you can make monetary gifts directly to our department’s PhD students via CashApp (extremely easy to download and use if you don’t already have it) at their handle: $buphilgrad.

The graduate students will internally distribute the funds to those most in need. Thanks in advance to those of you who choose to help support them.

You can learn more about the strike and the Boston University Graduate Workers Union here.

UPDATE (4/7/24): There is some discussion in the comments about graduate student TAs making $42,000/year. This is not the case for graduate students in philosophy and the humanities, who, as some commenters note below, are on 8-month stipends, make in the “mid $20,000s”, and are “prohibited from outside work while receiving it.”

For some comparisons, according to the Forbes Advisor Cost of Living Calculator, a $27,000 salary in Boston gets you a standard of living similar to making the following salaries in the following cities:

• $42,000 in Manhattan, New York
• $27,000 in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, California
• $19,000 in Charlottesville, Virginia and Chapel Hill, North Carolina
• $18,000 in Austin, Texas and Atlanta, Georgia
• $17,000 in Columbia, South Carolina and Lincoln, Nebraska
• $16,500 in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, and in South Bend, Indiana

The post Helping Philosophy Grad Students on Strike (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.