University Makes New Contract Offer to Graduate Students

Proposal aimed to end strike with increased PhD stipends and childcare support

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BU has made a new contract proposal to graduate students in hopes of ending the five-month strike. Photo by Hannah Osofsky

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University Makes New Contract Offer to Graduate Students

Proposal aims to end strike with increased PhD stipends and childcare support

August 7, 2024
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Hoping to bring an end to the five-month-long strike by the Boston University Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU), the University’s new leadership offered a contract proposal on Wednesday that includes a significant increase in stipend support for PhD students and additions to benefits, such as an increased childcare subsidy and 14 weeks of paid childcare leave for full-time stipended graduate workers.

“I hope the new package shows our students that we are listening, we value their contributions to BU, and that we want to reach a fair contract with BUGWU,” Gloria Waters, the University’s new provost and chief academic officer, wrote in a letter to faculty and staff.

I hope the new package shows our students that we are listening, we value their contributions to BU, and that we want to reach a fair contract with BUGWU.
Gloria Waters, BU provost and chief academic officer

“Our offer represents substantial movement in response to the concerns raised by BUGWU’s negotiating team over the past year of negotiations,” Waters wrote. “It puts us in line with our peers, and, at the same time, recognizes the constraints on the University budget.”

The “new and comprehensive” proposal commits to a minimum 12-month stipend of $45,000 to all PhD students within the University’s five-year funding guarantee.

The benefit for PhD students currently on 8-month contracts will be particularly significant, according to Waters. For instance, students who are now on 8-month contracts with stipends of $28,000 would receive 12-month contracts of $45,000—a 61 percent increase in their stipend support.

“I hope no matter what a student’s perspective is on what the University has to offer,” Waters says, “that they will communicate with their bargaining representatives so that all student voices can be represented in our final contract.”

The five-year contract proposal, presented by Waters at a negotiating session on Wednesday afternoon, also includes annual stipend increases of 3 percent per year, bringing the PhD minimum stipend rate to $50,647 in year five. Grad students paid at an hourly rate would see a new minimum of $20 per hour, also climbing 3 percent a year over the life of the contract.

The students in the BUGWU, which includes teaching assistants and teaching fellows, are paid for up to 20 hours of work per week. They spend additional time as students also fulfilling course requirements and doing dissertation research. 

Negotiations with BUGWU, which represents more than 3,000 master’s, professional, and PhD graduate students, began in July 2023. Some members of the union walked off their jobs in March of this year to press for a new contract with increased stipends and better benefits, among other issues. The BU bargaining unit is part of SEIU Local 509, which represents human service workers and educators in Massachusetts.

“We remain focused on finding meaningful solutions to the issues graduate workers are facing at work,” the union said in a statement late Wednesday. “Our bargaining team and membership will be discussing this proposal but we have no other comment at this time.”

“Though I have appreciated the opportunity to work directly with our graduate student bargaining team, both sides of the bargaining table have missed opportunities to advance negotiations at different points throughout the last year,” says Sarah Hokanson (CAS’05), assistant vice president and assistant provost, research development and PhD and postdoctoral affairs. “A different approach to bargaining is necessary if we are going to reach agreement before the fall. I am glad our leadership is taking this critical step with an aggressive offer that meets the needs and demands of our graduate students.”

New benefits in the University proposal include an increase to 14 weeks of paid childcare leave for full-time stipended graduate students who are new parents, up from 8 weeks, along with a $3,500 per year childcare subsidy, up from $600.

The University will also create an annual “help fund” of $200,000 to support graduate students with a variety of emergency needs.

BU will continue to cover the tuition of all PhD students within the five-year funding guarantee, currently $64,000 annually, and will also continue to cover health insurance for PhD students with no premium share, now valued between $3,400 and $4,500 per year. 

As part of the proposal, the University has offered to cover the cost of adding dependents through age six to the Student Health Services plan, as well as offering a $100 subsidy toward the purchase of dental insurance for each PhD student. The University has also offered commuting benefits to all bargaining unit members, including either a 50 percent MBTA subsidy or bicycle commuter reimbursement benefits.

“In putting this new and final proposal on the table, my goal is to get to a signed and ratified contract before the academic year begins,” Waters wrote.

“If we can reach agreement, our graduate students will get the benefits of the agreement soon after it is ratified. If we do not, the students will not see the benefits of the contract for the full academic year. I urged the union and its allies to join us, get the contract done, and move for a ratification vote on our proposal before the fall semester begins.”

And when negotiations conclude, there is more to come to advance graduate education at BU, administrators say.

“I am excited that our provost has committed to implement many of the recommendations from the Taskforce on the Future of PhD Education,” Hokanson says, “to ensure we are offering supportive and innovative training opportunities for our PhD students in the years to come.”

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  • Joel Brown

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There are 12 comments on University Makes New Contract Offer to Graduate Students

  1. Yes, I do feel that the university is really making a big gesture here. Increased stipends—including the 61% bump for PhD students on 8-month contracts—and improvements to childcare benefits are very substantial concessions directly related to some of the key issues of the BUGWU.

    It’s a proposal, as you said, and further negotiations are likely necessary in the finalizing of a contract. Common ground between the two parties will have to be found in view of the university’s straitened financial circumstances.

    Ultimately, what will be most desirable is coming up with a fair contract for graduate students that secures their finances and is supportive but at the same time also is sustainable for the university.

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  2. It’s nonsense! 61% sounds like a lot, but when your starting point is way below cost of living, 61% more is not really a big deal. Everything offered in the proposal is just fluff, but when you look at the details, you see that the administration does not value the students. This is unacceptable especially considering the size of endowment, and the exorbitant amount they charge undergraduates for tuition and fees!!

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    1. I concur that 61% might sound like a big increase, but if you are starting out below the cost of living in Boston -of all places- the it is not that big of a deal. $45,000 vs what a student I know of in getting $49,012 at Brown University in Providence which has a much lower cost of living gets more. That will go further in a lower cost of living. Perhaps BU should reign in it’s bloated administration in other areas and redirect those funds to supporting the actual students.

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  3. This offer is still the bare minimum of what BU could offer and frankly should have been offered way earlier. People lost paychecks to fight for more and i would be surprised if most grads will vote to accept this based on the mood in the bargaining session with over 200 grads listening in.

    The childcare stipend is still only about half of what other institutions in Boston offers (3.5k vs 7 – 8k). And infuriatingly BU is refusing to offer anything meaningful on access needs which could bring a lot of good to everyone at BU including faculty, staff and undergrads.

    The five-year duration is highly unusual for a higher ed contract and frankly insulting with a static 3% raise per year given the housing market in Boston. BU is scared that if they give grads a cost of living adjustment based on rental prices then they will have to do the same for faculty and staff.

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  4. Unfortunately, the realities of the cost of living crisis in Boston mean that this offer does not go far enough. Those who are not currently on the rental market are not exposed to the realities of just how bad it is. While I was hoping I could afford to remain on Boston on a salary that is higher than this offer, it is not feasible and I will have to do hybrid work from outside of Boston. But that is not feasible for graduate workers who are required to come in every day of the week to teach classes and attend to their own work. COLA is especially necessary, because BU cannot predict that a 3% yearly raise will allow students to afford their rent increases for five years. This will further exacerbate the crisis, as students are forced to pay extra to move to places they can still barely afford.

    Further, I am disappointed that the University is still taking the ableist stance of not providing vision insurance. Without my contacts or glasses, I could not perform my work or follow any presentations in classes or seminars due to my poor sight. Just because the insurance industry has decided that correcting vision somehow does not count as part of healthcare does not mean that BU is justified in not offering vision insurance. I tried to use the benefits programs that BU offers, but the programs are intentionally confusing and made difficult to use, and are not a substitute for actual insurance.

    BU should be striving not just to be in line with other Universities, but to offer a competitive package that attracts the best students. To be the best students and workers, graduates need to be paid enough to live in Boston without being severely rent burdened and food insecure.

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  5. Alright, so let’s wade through the verbiage of BU’s new contract offer to their grad workers, who’ve been on strike for months. The whole setup is textbook bourgeois appeasement, offering just enough material concessions to stave off a full-blown revolt but not so much as to actually disrupt the existing class structure. We’re talking about a university, an institution that functions like a business despite its pretensions of being a bastion of knowledge and enlightenment, trying to maintain its profit margins by pacifying its increasingly restless workforce.

    You’ve got this new leadership coming in hot, tossing out figures like $45,000 a year in stipends, as if that’s supposed to make everyone forget that most of these students are not just “students” in the traditional sense—they’re also laborers, doing the teaching, grading, and research that keep the university machine running. The offer is framed as “substantial movement” in negotiations, which, let’s be honest, translates to “we’ve calculated the bare minimum we think you’ll accept to stop the strike.”

    The language is all about “listening” and “valuing contributions,” but it’s important to see this for what it is: a strategic attempt to reassert control. By increasing stipends and benefits, BU is essentially saying, “Look how generous we are,” while still keeping the grad students firmly in a precarious position—dependent on the institution’s goodwill, without the kind of real power that would come from, say, a much higher wage, stronger job security, or a say in university governance.

    What’s missing here, and it’s missing in a way that’s almost painfully obvious, is any real acknowledgment of the underlying power dynamics. The grad workers are not just asking for a few more dollars—they’re demanding recognition of their role as workers within a capitalist structure that exploits their labor while paying lip service to their “educational experience.” This is not just about getting a better deal within the current system; it’s about challenging the system itself, which is why the administration’s offer, no matter how “aggressive,” is still fundamentally conservative.

    And the University’s rhetoric—“constraints on the University budget,” “recognizes the needs of our students,” etc.—is designed to make the offer sound both generous and necessary, as if there’s no alternative but to accept the terms as they are. The administration wants to close this chapter as quickly as possible, to return to business as usual without addressing the structural issues that brought about the strike in the first place.

    Here’s the kicker: even if this offer is accepted, it’s not the end. It’s a temporary truce in an ongoing class struggle within the academy. The university, like any capitalist enterprise, will continue to extract as much labor as possible while giving back the minimum necessary to maintain the facade of fairness and benevolence. The graduate students, if they’re smart, will take whatever gains they can get from this negotiation and continue organizing, continue pushing for a real transformation in how the university operates—a transformation that would require not just better wages and benefits, but a fundamental redistribution of power.

    And let’s not ignore the elephant in the room—Boston is now the second most expensive city in the U.S. for renters (https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/boston-is-2nd-most-expensive-us-city-for-renters-new-report-shows/2873892/). So while BU is patting itself on the back for offering a $45,000 stipend, the reality is that grad students are likely to see a significant chunk of that evaporate just to keep a roof over their heads. This so-called “substantial movement” by the administration is barely keeping pace with the skyrocketing cost of living, a cost that BU, as a major institutional presence in Boston, has helped drive up. The housing crisis isn’t just a backdrop to these negotiations—it’s a key part of the systemic exploitation that grad workers are fighting against. The administration’s offer might sound good on paper, but in the context of Boston’s rental market, it’s clear that the university is still asking its grad students to survive on crumbs while the landlords and developers cash in.

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  6. Considering the brutal rent and cost of living in Boston, Ph.D. students still have to live in room shares while completing their Ph.D. studies for 5-6 years. At the very least, I think we should be paid enough money to rent a studio.

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  7. Housing is the answer: Some universities across the country including George Mason offer faculty and staff the option of housing at a discounted rate. Several universities are now offering housing on campus for free for faculty and staff to curve the cost of living.

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    1. Thanks for reading. We offered the union the opportunity to comment and they instead provided a statement, which we included in the story. – The BU Today team

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  9. “14 weeks of paid childcare leave for full-time stipended graduate students who are new parents, up from 8 weeks, along with a $3,500 per year childcare subsidy, up from $600.”

    This is more assistance than full-time staff get. I don’t get any childcare subsidy from the university, and my parental leave as the dad was 12 weeks. The BU Children’s Center is hardly a bargain at $2880/mo for infants.

    I agree that cost of living in Boston is out of control and a chronic issue, but I hope the BUGWU recognizes where it’s getting some real wins, too. DeniseFord’s idea to address housing is a good one.

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  10. Yes, renting in Boston is expensive. But so is renting in NYC or LA and the new 45k offer is close to what similar universities in these cities offer. That said, BU should agree to COLA. Its a no brainer.

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