Tri-Cities student employees join hundreds of WSU workers demanding to unionize

RICHLAND – Student workers at Washington State University could soon be at the bargaining table with administrators to ask for better pay and more equitable hours.

A majority of graduate and undergraduate students last week across the university’s several campuses voted in favor of forming a union in an effort to be recognized as a new collective bargaining unit, the WSU Coalition of Academic Student Employees/United Auto Workers (WSU-CASE/UAW).

The effort affects 1,600 student workers statewide, mostly graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants, research assistants, tutors and graders, according to a news release.

It would also affect about 50 student employees at WSU Tri-Cities, said Shawnee Kasanki, a third-year doctoral student studying natural resources and environmental sciences.

“The ultimate goal is to improve the work-life conditions of academic student employees, which will in turn improve the entire university community,” she said.

“We’re really passionate about our work. We really love teaching, and we’re really doing it because of that passion.”

On Friday, student workers at the Tri-Cities satellite campus delivered their authorization cards to Chancellor Sandra Haynes’ office and held a rally in solidarity.

Universities often pay student workers below the state’s minimum wage due to their student status, and workers often aren’t allowed to seek additional employment opportunities outside their college.

Weekly work hours at WSU are capped at 20 hours, Kasanki said.

Concerning work conditions

A growing number of student workers at WSU has begun speaking out about problems with work, according to the release.

Some include toxic work environments, discrimination, inadequate institutional support and other stories of struggle.

WSU is the only major public research institution on the West Coast that does not have a union for student employees.

“In thousands of conversations with our colleagues, we kept hearing the same things: That people are struggling,” Priyanka Bushana, a research assistant in translational medicine and physiology at WSU Health Sciences in Spokane, said in a statement.

“The health insurance is inadequate for many ASEs, compensation isn’t keeping up with housing and other costs, there isn’t recourse against discrimination and bullying, and the list goes on,” she continued.

Kasanki, 33, who works as a research assistant at Tri-Cities, said she makes about $40,000 a year thanks to a distinguished graduate research fellowship between WSU and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

But her circumstances are the exception, and employment isn’t guaranteed during the summer for her co-workers.

WSU Tri-Cities is composed mostly of nontraditional students, who are over the age of 25. They’re more likely to have families, children, and be balancing a job along school work.

“Having these sorts of equity in resources and support are especially important to the people here at the Tri-Cities campus,” Kasanki said.