GSEU’s new contract, ratified on June 10, 2025, was an important victory for graduate workers in SUNY. However, with the retroactive nature of the contract (July 2023 - July 2026), and its implementation at SBU being uncharitable, inconsistent, and not infrequently plain wrong, TAs and GAs here have been engaged in a constant struggle against underpayment. There are also plenty of examples of blatant wage theft that can very easily go unnoticed by the worker and GSEU alike. Relying on the mass activity of workers, and actively taking up cases of underpayment even when they involved non-members, SBU GSEU has secured an out-of-contract campus minimum raise, has been able to fight back against wage theft, and has seen our membership grow to around 72%. We have also actively partnered with undergraduate groups on campus and RAU in the Sanctuary Campus campaign, and developed an active political education committee in CWA 1104 Education Division.
Contract Enforcement and Campus Minimum Raise
New York State would go on to delay our contractual raises for over 6 weeks (till Nov. 19), and we had a further nasty surprise in store. In a departure from established campus precedent (and contrary to what had been communicated to members by statewide GSEU leadership at the time of ratification), the raises would be implemented, not as a uniform raise to all state-employed TAs/GAs, but in a tiered manner with less pay for workers earlier into their program and those who were RAs in the Fall semester. Workers who had graduated or switched to an RA line were denied retro-pay altogether for their past work as a TA; coupled with numerous other inconsistencies and mistakes, over a thousand workers were substantially underpaid by up to thousands of dollars in raises, bonuses and retro-pay.
The moment we got wind of this possibility (late October), GSEU mobilized with the slogan of “equal pay for equal work” and fair payment of all current and former employees. We were met with wilful ignorance and apathy from SBU admin who make six-figure salaries and get upwards of 100k in raises yearly – including the statement that we (graduate workers) are not really workers, our salaries are meant not to cover living expenses, but to “defray the costs of graduate education”. Joining forces with RAU, who were being stonewalled in their contract negotiations, we held a militant mass demonstration on Nov. 20 (our “Pay Day Rally”), marching to the offices of SUNY RF and the SBU Provost, with threats of escalation if our demands were ignored. RF gave in to RAU’s wage demands soon; we got the promise of a meeting with campus admin “soon” to discuss our demands.
The meeting, however, was put off by admin until mid-January. At the meeting, we proposed a raise to the TA/GA campus minimum wage to achieve equality in pay rate with the new RAU contract, and a 9% raise to those who made more than the new minimum, along with a correction to past underpayment. We were told that correcting past retro-pay errors was a non-starter at campus level, and our campus minimum proposal would “be considered”. After two weeks of radio silence, they unilaterally announced a $2,000 raise to the campus minimum effective February 1, 2026 (bringing the base stipend to $28,000) followed by an additional $2,000 raise effective August 1, 2026 (bringing the base stipend to $30,000). Too little too late, as the initial raise affected less than half of our unit, and even with the second, there is a gap of nearly $300 a month (and growing) between TA and RA minimums.
Moreover, in the next month, over half of our bargaining unit was underpaid in bonuses yet again (some missing the payments altogether). Despite there being no such clause in our contract, those on partial lines received a prorated 50% of the bonus, with the implementation copy-pasted from a previous, drastically different bonus – citing, if you would believe, “past precedent”! We again mobilized against this wage theft with email campaigns and informational picketing at university events, resulting in them paying up missing bonuses – though NYS OER dug their heels in on the pro-rating, forcing us to take it up at state level.
The lessons to take for us are that our employers (campus admin and NYS) will attempt to undercut us at every turn, interpreting contracts, the law, and past precedence as they see fit. Workers’ organization and disruptive mass mobilizations are the only way to keep them honest, to the extent possible within the capitalist framework.
Unearthing Wage Theft and Exploitation
Widespread wage theft occurred with the rollout of the Sign-on Bonus on October 22, 2025 – a lump-sum payment negotiated by GSEU to help offset the cost of being on an expired contract for two years. Per our contract, TA/GAs on full assistantships (~20 hours per week) were due a $1500 bonus, and those on fewer hours were to receive $750. Since previous experience has taught us that SUNY and SBU are likely to underpay us if left unchecked, we encouraged members to carefully check their paystubs, compare with those of their colleagues, and reach out to GSEU leadership to report discrepancies and ask questions. This turned out to be hugely important, now and later, for unearthing and rectifying wage theft.
Many employees working a full 20 hours per week noticed that they received only $750. Through careful comparison of a number of these cases, a pattern emerged: a number of departments officially classified full-time TAs improperly as less-than-full TAs. This happened for a variety of reasons, including (i) genuine administrative incompetence, (ii) creative bookkeeping aimed at cobbling together multiple funding sources for what’s ostensibly a single TAship, and (iii) varying and often nearly inscrutable combinations of (i) and (ii)—e.g., someone expected to work 15–20 hours a week and paid as much, but hired for the first half of the semester on a 7–10 hour TA line, then for the second half of the semester on a 7–10 hour RA line. In all cases, though, the result is the same: an employee doing full-time work received $750 less than others working the same positions. Many GSEU rank-and-file members brought this issue up to their departments directly, and we worked with rank-and-file members in other departments to file grievances and recover the missing payments. In total, we managed to recover $750 for 41 underpaid workers, recovering $30,750 in wage theft. Willingness to collaborate with GSEU to correct underpayment varied substantially from department to department, resulting in faster (within a month) or slower (up to six months or more) resolutions.
Spring 2026 saw even more widespread wage theft with the disbursement of lump-sum bonuses. On February 25, 2026, GAs and TAs were set to receive two different bonus payments: the Doctoral Fund, and the Downstate Bonus. The per capita amounts were not pre-determined, but instead based on a fixed campus allocation (of approximately $2 million) which was to be split evenly among the bargaining unit.
For these reasons, GSEU formally requested from LR and HR, weeks in advance, a list of all employees set to receive these bonuses, along with the per capita amounts each employee would receive. They never replied, and we only became aware of payment issues when GSEU members began seeing incorrect pay stubs. Over 100 workers were entirely missing one or both bonuses, and various others were paid less than the full amount. SBU’s failure to include over 100 TAs and GAs in the per capita payments meant that they incorrectly spent the entire campus allocation by paying a slightly smaller pool of employees a slightly higher per capita amount than they otherwise would have. The first response from Labor Relations regarding this issue stated that both underpayments and “overpayments” would be “corrected”—that is, in order to fund the missing payments, they would claw back thousands of dollars from previously paid TAs and GAs. A measure like this would have violated New York State Finance Law—nonetheless, our employers can and do often get away with illegal wage theft, and merely reminding them of the law is rarely of much use on its own. In response, GSEU members participated en masse in an email campaign directed at NYS Office of Employee Relations, SUNY and SBU admin, and also flyered at the March 2 University Senate meeting about recent wage theft. Within just half an hour of our email campaign, LR responded, committing for the first time to a concrete timeline for investigating and rectifying the underpayment issue. In a subsequent meeting, LR officially backed down from its previous plan to “correct overpayments” and committed to covering the missing payments through the University’s own funds. Through member mobilization, we successfully prevented the University from correcting its own administrative error using our wages, and avoided ~$115,000 of additional wage theft.
Finally, another particularly disturbing type of wage theft, attested in a number of departments all year, is through illegal, unannounced manipulation of previously signed hiring paperwork. One scenario we saw in a number of cases proceeded roughly as follows:
Say a worker was issued hiring paperwork prior to the start of the Fall 2025 term for a full GAship (~15–20 hours a week) at a biweekly pay rate of $1,000. They sign and date this paperwork, their department’s Graduate Program Coordinator signs and dates the paperwork, and their hiring is finalized. Then, some days later, HR notices that this violates SBU’s campus minimum ($1238.10 biweekly). Accordingly, someone in HR (or another office), instead of raising their pay rate, decides to reduce their weekly working hours (say, to 7-10hrs/week) or the duration of their contract (to half a semester). In any case, modification of an already finalized hiring agreement requires the paperwork to be re-issued and re-signed. Unfortunately, in at least eight different cases, these changes were made without the worker’s knowledge. Hence, they continued working the same hours they originally signed onto.
What’s especially insidious about these cases is that the rosters GSEU receives only contain the retroactively “corrected” (i.e. improperly manipulated) information about appointment type and pay, making detection of wage theft especially difficult. Thankfully, our rank-and-file membership have developed a culture of discussing their wages, hiring agreements, & other aspects of their employment with their colleagues, and we are in regular contact with members about workplace issues.
In September 2025, we discovered one such case on a walkthrough. This discovery led us to reach out to employees in similar work areas, or with similar partial appointments or irregular contract lengths. In the end, we worked with 8 graduate workers in similar situations to file underpayment grievances, successfully getting them the full campus minimum biweekly pay rate. In the end, we recovered over $15,000 in stolen wages and prevented tens of thousands more dollars of future wage theft (which would’ve kept occurring if left unchecked).
On the one hand, it’s encouraging that our union has been able to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen wages, reflecting a highly mobilized and educated rank-and-file membership. These qualities were further strengthened, in turn, through successful wage theft recovery campaigns. One effective part of SBU GSEU’s approach to recovering stolen wages was to reach out to both dues-paying members and non-members with the same assistance. Rather than refuse to educate or help non-members, we took these grievances as an opportunity to show them the importance of union representation in the workplace. We gained the trust of many eventual members this way, and found that it was often highly effective to encourage still-unsigned workers to become GSEU members once their wage theft had been successfully recovered. In doing so, we grew our ranks not by threatening or dangling carrots, but through working in tandem with workers and showing them how the union fights for them.
For all the successes outlined above, there are other unresolved cases, and almost certainly many others hidden. Missing retroactive pay represents $500,000 to $1,000,000 or more in wage theft—SBU GSEU grieved this underpayment at the campus level, and after a long delay, this grievance was denied by SBU and punted off to a lengthy statewide appeal process. Unpaid Downstate Bonus payments due to pro-rating, punted to NYS OER, amount to $75,000.
In sum: GSEU has managed to recover an impressive amount of stolen wages in the past year, totaling nearly $200,000 (a conservative estimate), but wage theft continues to harm workers every day—proactive action against wage theft, a militant and highly organized membership, and constant vigilance are as necessary as ever.
Sanctuary Campus Campaign
GSEU, RAU and undergrad and faculty groups at SBU have joined forces to fight for increased protections from ICE raids, in the face of woefully inadequate SUNY and SBU policy. Since the beginning of 2025, as ICE has stepped up its assault on migrant workers and students in universities and communities across the US, and ICE activity around Long Island (with help from local police forces) and in other universities in NY keeps increasing, SUNY and SBU administration’s response can best be described as burying their heads in the sand. In Spring 2025, there were 11 student visas revoked at SBU, and the administrative office supposed to be in charge of the situation was found to be on vacation.
Our sanctuary campus demands have mass support, they are very reasonable asks of a university administration that is serious about protecting its campus, and many of them are in place in other universities across the US. However, SBU admin’s response has been to ignore our demands for over a year, painting them as either impossible or extremely difficult matters requiring prolonged deliberation. Through mass rallies, vigils, flyering and informational picketing, and questioning them in public forums, we have carried out an exposure of the flaws in their narrative and how it endangers the SBU community. We have also begun doing our own KYR trainings across campus, gathered legal resources, and begun laying the foundations of a rapid response network. This has been admonished as us “taking matters into their own hands”, but since admin has been clear that their plan is to do nothing, we will keep each other safe. As a labor union, this is an integral part of our fight for workplace control and dignity.
Measures against SUNY’s collaboration with ICE will be part of a number of social demands that GSEU will bring up for negotiation in the next contract, linking our contract fight with these struggles.
Political Education
In Summer 2025, CWA 1104 Education Division began a political education series, initiated by Stony Brook graduate workers with members from Buffalo and Fordham, where we discussed Joe Burns’ book Class Struggle Unionism and organizing techniques and methods. We learnt a good deal about labor history, strategy, and tactics, gained a much clearer understanding of the present state of US unions, and had fruitful discussions on implementing these insights in our union organi
ing. It impressed upon us the need for political education and class outlook in our unions.
Accordingly, we expanded our Poli-Ed into a biweekly series in the 2025-26 academic year, covering three books each semester. Joe Burns’ Strike Back taught us about public sector strikes in the US and sparked fun discussions on how we can fight the Taylor Law. William Z. Foster’s American Trade Unionism and Kim Kelly’s Fight Like Hell gave us lessons from militant periods of labor organizing in the US. Jeff Schuhrke’s Blue-Collar Empire and No Neutrals There impressed upon us the need for anti-imperialist international solidarity. Michael D. Yates’ Can the Working Class Change the World? gave us a broad global perspective of workers’ struggles.
Besides our regular discussions, we also had special sessions. On Nov. 8, 2025, labor historian, author, and SUNY Empire State faculty Jeff Schuhrke joined us for a webinar on his books which we were reading, and also regaled us with experiences from his own grad worker organizing. On Feb. 19, 2026, we had a panel on Working-Class Struggle against Fascism, with four eminent labor and anti-fascist militants and writers – Steve Zeltzer, Carol Lang, Gabriel Prawl and Russ Bellant. Their contributions have been summarized in a separate article.
Beyond influencing our approach to day-to-day union work, political education has helped us take informed stances on issues from a working-class perspective. Following GSEU’s statewide framework for statements and resolutions (adopted by GSEU’s statewide DMB last semester), SBU GSEU initiated emergency statements on the US’ military interventions in Venezuela, the extrajudicial ICE murders in Minneapolis, and the US’ war on Iran, which were all adopted by statewide GSEU. We have also helped introduce a resolution on BDS, which has been approved by the DMB to go out to statewide membership vote on May 13. GSEU members should be on the lookout for more information about the vote!
One shortcoming has been a dwindling attendance, as well as lack of participation from across campuses beyond SBU. Our political education resources are available here. We cannot stress enough the value of these discussions and their relevance in practical organizing work – we highly encourage interested workers who are reading this to contact us at sbugseu@gmail.com, and let us know if you have any suggestions for improving or broadening our efforts!
