ASE Head Steward
Ellen Graham
Hi, I’m Ellen, a 4th year PhD student in the Department of Biostatistics, and would be the only member of Joint Council from the School of Public Health (SPH). Over the last few years, organizing within our union has helped me realize that we are far from powerless and deserve to be treated much better as workers. Now that we’ve won big changes at the University level with our new contract, we have time to focus on our departmental level organizing and build strong connections with each other to protect and build our rights, and to win an even better contract next bargaining cycle. When we come together, we can make real systemic changes to protect not only the individuals currently getting hurt, but also to keep the next person from going through the same thing.
I first got involved in organizing two years ago to enforce our contract and ensure biostatistics appointments were given out at least a month ahead of time. Organizing to reduce the financial stress for ASEs in my department encouraged me to become a steward for my department to continue empowering ASEs to take care of each other. During and following contract negotiations last year, I helped build two organizing committees to build power and connections within and across departments. In the SPH organizing committee, we’re organizing around appointment security and timing, and developing stewards in departments that haven’t had any for years. In the lead-up to our strike last year, I joined the picket planning committee and became deeply involved in organizing our in-person picket lines and coordinating them on the day of the strike. The difficulty and importance of rapidly disseminating information to our members during that time emphasized how critical it is to have strong existing networks of trust and communication in each department to win the changes we want to see.
I want to work towards building these networks now, well before bargaining begins again, not only so we’ll be prepared to win an even better contract next time but also so members and organizers are empowered to tackle the issues affecting them, their departments, and their schools right now. To help build these networks, I will help all stewards and organizers get access to trainings, and connect organizers across departments to share skills and address shared problems. The connections I made during bargaining showed me how many problems in Biostatistics were systemic to the School of Public Health. Now through our organizing committee, we’re working to address these issues across the school. I hope to work towards connecting organizers to existing organizing committees and helping them build new ones if necessary to build community and power within and across departments.
I know that we deserve so much better from UW, and I’ve seen how much we can do when we come together to fight for change. I’m excited to continue this fight to build a better UW together.
Sophie Hurwitz
Hi I’m Sophie, a 4th year PhD candidate in the Biochemistry department. I wanted to help support my colleagues at UW, and so I joined contract enforcement. While on contract enforcement, I have helped ASEs resolve harassment and discrimination issues, health and safety issues, and helped union members from across UW navigate the convoluted processes for taking leave and accessing healthcare. Then, because I developed this contract expertise, last year I attended bargaining meetings and helped with proposals around our grievance protocol and brand-new reasonable accommodations articles. My experience organizing around grievances and with my department also prepared me to be a picket line captain: 5am at Montlake!
I’m proud of my work in contract enforcement and am running for head steward to broaden the impact we have as a union at UW. One of the issues I saw last year is that we rely heavily on a small group of members in a lot of union spaces, including contract enforcement. I want to develop more accessible training to share the organizing load. This will empower stewards with the tools and information to lead on more grievances that are happening in their departments. Members experiencing harm that come to contract enforcement usually want to prevent others from experiencing the same thing, and working more closely with organizers will help to ensure this. By empowering the organizers that are talking to members to recognize and lead on contract violations, we can do more as a union to fight back against UW’s continuous harm and strengthen our contract enforcement even more.
Just like I don’t want all the burden to be on the contract enforcement work group, I don’t want all the burden to be on department stewards either. I want to develop regular informational meetings that all members can attend to explain how to navigate issues that regularly come up: taking leave, getting accommodations, access to UPASS especially for hourly ASEs, and more. One of the reasons that taking leave is so difficult to navigate, is that not all ASEs qualify for Washington’s Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) program. In October I volunteered for canvasses and phone banks with our union partly because I want legislative change to PFML. Our union is organizing to expand access to this program for everyone who receives a stipend, and to make PFML accessible for ASEs that work part-time during the entire academic year. Our union originally organized to pass PFML to help protect our members from dangerous financial situations after a medical issue, and it’s time that more of us could access this awesome program.
I think we can do amazing things to generate change here at UW together and am looking forward to continuing to represent ASEs from all across UW!
Carina Imburgia
Hi, I’m Carina, a 3rd year PhD student in the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department. One of the primary reasons I chose to attend UW for graduate school is because our ASE position is unionized. Since my first week here, I have been involved in organizing within CSE. Our department is the largest in our unit with over 700 ASEs, many of whom are undergraduate, hourly ASEs. Despite its size, CSE can feel isolated at times from other parts of UW. We have incredible potential to contribute to our collective power, but I haven’t seen CSE use its full organizing potential yet.
To work towards this, I have been working with other members in the Tech Departments’ OC (CSE, HCDE, iSchool). This cross-department committee has been invaluable, and I’ve learned so much about building coalitions, distributing organizing work, and collaborating with organizers. We face unique challenges organizing within a department this large, because it requires strategy to reach as many people as we can. As bargaining approached last year, myself and a few other organizers restarted the lab liaison role within our department. Our goal was to have one liaison for each sub-area of research in our department. The result was a stronger communication network and several new organizers in our department who have continued to remain active post-bargaining and address issues within CSE. In this way, organizing in CSE has helped me understand the sorts of structures we need to strategically use throughout campus to organize members and to reach non-members.
My goals if elected are to:
- Improve communication and information access to members: I will work towards increasing transparency within our union. As a start, this could involve making sure our existing platforms have centralized and explicit locations for important communications and information (e.g., links to meeting agendas and descriptions, how to join them, and minutes afterwards). More broadly, I plan to make sure that clear communication with membership is continually part of the discussion as we set actionable goals around solidarity and building our union.
- Strategize around hourly ASE organizing: Hourly ASEs make up a large proportion of our unit, but they are under represented in organizing conversations. To increase participation from this group, we need to make conversations with them a priority, build a sustainable undergrad oc, and include representation from them at meetings.
- Provide representation for the CSE department on the Joint Council: Having a member of the CSE department on the Joint Council will strengthen the connection between one of the largest departments on campus and our union. I will give a voice to ASEs within our department by continuing to engage in 1:1 conversations with my peers in the department and bringing their experiences to discussions about our union’s strategies and priorities. Additionally, I will be able to better help more members understand our union’s resources and how to access them so that we can achieve our organizing goals together.
Anna Parkhurst
After the 2023/2024 bargaining year, I made a pledge to myself and my colleagues to take a more active role in advocating for the needs of ASEs, many of whom felt overlooked in the swift decision to accept the meager pay raises offered by our current contract.
As head steward, I will work to uplift all ASEs who feel that their needs are not met by the current contract. In doing so, I will prioritize meaningful relationship building across departments, so that our collective actions are grounded in real solidarity. We need to build a union culture where we act upon genuine investment in each other’s wellbeing, not just the belief that we should do so. In order to build a strong union culture driven by a shared class consciousness, we need to empower our rank-and-file members to participate at all levels of union activity, including internal governance and administration and collective actions.
Leadership must be directly accountable to our rank-and-file members, and, if I am elected, I believe an important part of my job will be democratizing the membership’s access to the information they need to participate. I want to reform our current communication strategies, which rely predominantly on email, Slack, and ad hoc phone contact, in favor of those which facilitate consistent and concise information distribution. In particular, I support establishing regular, direct rapport between more and less active union members to ground our communications in meaningful relationships that can generate reliable participation. I also advocate for moving away from holding meetings over Zoom in favor of holding in-person hybrid model meetings. In a post-COVID19-outbreak world, we are all fatigued from being constantly online. We should continue to practice accessibility by offering Zoom as an option, but we need to encourage in-person participation. If we want to foster more meaningful discussions about union activities and governance, then we need to work towards building a culture of co-presence. The first time that we see each other cannot be at a rally or on the day of the strike.
As a fifth-year PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies, I see my scholarship as deeply tied to the same issues at stake within our union. My work, which sheds light on the underrecognized and undercompensated labor of social media content creators, mirrors our own struggles as ASEs who are underrecognized and undercompensated by this university. My scholarly position informs my political position, and vice versa. We deserve better. We deserve more. And we must place ourselves in the best position to be able to fight for what we deserve. I would be honored to serve as one of your Head Stewards.
Thank you for your consideration.
Anna Pearson
Hi! I’m Anna, a third-year PhD student in the Earth and Space Sciences department. I signed up for membership in my first year, thinking my job was done, but quickly realized that real change requires active participation and the collective effort of all members. I became a department steward last fall and immediately became immersed in organizing efforts within and beyond my department.
I joined the new College of the Environment organizing committee, where we strengthened our bargaining power by organizing new members and hosting area meetings where we could discuss bargaining and key issues affecting students college-wide. While negotiations were ongoing, I helped organize to prevent the College of the Environment from adopting a new inequitable travel reimbursement policy that would have cost us more of our personal money for field work. This experience highlighted that the power for change is not only exercised during bargaining, but year-round.
Since bargaining, I have continued to build our union by helping implement a strong orientation program for new ASEs this Fall and supporting our union’s political organizing. My goal is to empower more organizers across campuses and connect with ASEs that may have felt less engaged in bargaining. This includes engaging areas on campus that currently lack a steward and with members who weren’t aware of what’s possible for us to win. For instance, at Western Washington University, the primarily undergraduate hourly employee union recently won partial tuition reimbursement in their contract. This provides an exciting opportunity to expand the ways in which we can fight for hourly ASEs at UW. However, partial tuition reimbursement at WWU won’t become a reality unless the state legislature passes supportive legislation.
What our union helps win off-campus plays a vital role in supporting progress on-campus. The state legislature and city council have the power to pass policies that impact many of the things we fight for at the bargaining table: improving our health and safety at work and strengthening minimum wage laws that improve our leverage during bargaining. I am excited to be a part of our union’s work to elect these representatives that will represent us, the workers, so we can continue improving our lives in Washington at the bargaining table and beyond.
Due to our hard work organizing last year, helped by the support we had from community members and our political representatives who showed up and reached out to UW in support of us, we won significant wage increases and a record-setting contract last spring. However, those wage increases were still not enough to address the cost of living. To win more next time, we have to start building power now for our next contract in 2027. Waiting until bargaining begins is simply too late. I want to develop new leadership across campus and engage current organizers to address the issues we face in our departments, our colleges, and our wider community. Together, we can build a stronger, more inclusive union.
Mariah Ribeiro
[No statement submitted]Joshua Sturman
If elected, I will work to implement reforms in the following areas:
Democratization
- The Union must centralize decision-making in the General Membership Meeting to ensure that all interested participants have the ability to contribute to decisions.
- The Union must formally define the authority of standing committees to ensure that they do not act against the membership’s wishes.
- The Union must better facilitate member participation in internal governance and administration, and it must improve members’ ability to provide feedback to leadership on Union matters.
- The Union must become a mass participation organization with accountability for elected officials.
Planning and Mobilization
- The Union must engage in long-term planning to ensure the efficacy and interconnectedness of, attendance at, and participation in its plans.
- The Union must establish permanent mobilizing structures that reach all members individually and ensure consistent contact between the same mobilizers and mobilizees, most importantly by establishing a phone tree.
- The Union must abandon its reliance on illegal protest tactics like sit-ins in favor of strategies that exercise its labor power and broad-based community support.
- The Union must establish minimum expectations for participation from its members and enforce these through social pressure.
Communication
- The Union must diversify and more effectively utilize communication mediums.
- The Union must democratize and expand opportunities for open discussion.
- The Union must dismantle inequities in information accessibility.
Education
- The Union needs to train new and current union members in labor theory and union tactics.
- The Union should root concrete bargaining proposals in principled ideology that centers the union as a vehicle for worker struggle.
ASE Forestry Steward
Dano Holt
My name is Dano Holt and I’m a PhD student and ASE in the School of Environmental and Forest Science (aka Forestry)! I am thrilled to be running for ASE Steward in my department and to have this opportunity to work for my colleagues in SEFS to ensure our rights are enforced and our concerns addressed. As steward, I will work to strengthen our communication networks, to make sure that ASEs in our department are fully informed on their rights, that their ideas supported and amplified, needs are addressed and work diligently to ensure the protections and benefits we have won are enforced.
Prior to starting my PhD here at UW, I got my first real taste of community organizing when I started my master’s degree at Washington State University. Within a handful of weeks of starting, I realized that the lab I had joined was highly toxic and working with my intended advisor was not an option. When I reached out for help from the department, I found that while everyone I spoke to was sympathetic, no one from within the university structure was going to actually fight to help me. My job before starting grad school was unionized and I had experienced the power of having a voice and enforceable protections in the workplace. At the time WSU did not have a union for ASE’s, so that very week I signed up to be a part of the Organizing Committee working to establish an ASE union for the first time. I had the privilege of working with ASEs from across WSU, watching our authorization card numbers get closer and closer to majority, speaking at our rally the day we filed for union authorization, serving on the bargaining team and cheering my colleagues on from here in Seattle when they won their first contract last January. I am deeply proud that I took my own experiences and made sure that future ASEs will have more options to protect themselves and each other and that WSU will be safer and more equitable place for generations to come.
As Steward for SEFS (Forestry), I will use my organizing experience to help make sure that the contract we fought so hard for here at UW is enforced in our department. I will work with ASE’s from across UW to continue fighting to make this school functionally equitable and accessible to everyone. I believe deeply that by engaging in community action and organizing in our local sphere, be it here in SEFS and UW, or partnering with workers and organizers across the state and the nation, we can be a part of fighting for a better future.
Amelia Keyser-Gibson
I’m Amelia (she/her) and I’m a 3rd year grad student in SEFS. I became involved in union organizing a year ago after realizing that our union was a tangible avenue through which to address some of the commonly experienced issues and inequalities in our department. While not officially serving in a steward role, I’ve been attending the College of the Environment organizing committee meetings for the past year to learn about the intricacies of our union and effective strategies for building power. I’ve gained experience helping organize rallies, actions, the strike and area meetings, and raising issues to administrators and department heads. It’s been exciting to see the power we can build by organizing across departments within the college and the university as a whole. I learned during bargaining last year that it can be difficult as busy grad students to keep up with everything happening and decide where to focus our limited time and energy. I’m excited to apply what I’ve learned so far, and will continue to learn, as an advocate for the interests of students in our department. As steward, I’ll strive to effectively communicate union priorities and initiatives back to the department. I will also be available to listen, strategize and bring department issues back to a broader community of organizers, as well as work for change locally within SEFS.
Leo Wahl
My name is Leo Wahl (he/him) and this is my third year as a SEFS graduate student and member of UAW 4121. In my first year, I played a key role in organizing a wage campaign within SEFS, which highlighted the financial challenges faced by graduate students in our department. As part of this effort, I helped design and distribute a financial stress survey, presented the results to faculty, met with the director to advocate for change, and organized a series of town halls to facilitate open discussions between faculty and graduate students. Last year, I spent time organizing within our department and union to strengthen our power before contract bargaining. This included serving on the healthcare working group to research and form the healthcare language in our contract. This contract campaign culminated with an ASE strike to gain the benefits of a stronger contract.
This collection of experiences deepened my understanding of the issues we face as graduate students and reinforced my commitment to advocating for better working conditions, fair compensation, and a more supportive environment for everyone in the SEFS community. I am running for union steward because we need thoughtful, transparent leadership to continue fighting for our rights and ensuring that every member’s voice is heard. I’m committed to working collaboratively with all members of our community to advance our shared goals and build a stronger, more equitable SEFS.
