Welcome to GW Graduate Students United’s Grad Worker Survey! GW Graduate Students United (GW-GSU) is our graduate worker union, supported by SEIU Local 500. We are a group of graduate student workers at George Washington University who have joined together to organize a labor union and help make GW the best university it can be. We believe that, by working together, we will be in a better place to advocate for improved working conditions, a fairer and more transparent university, and better livelihoods.

We realize that those of us involved in this union-building campaign only know so much about the graduate worker experience across campus. And we recognize that the lack of information about graduate work life often leaves us in the dark to what better working and living conditions could look like. To remedy this, we created a short survey of anonymous questions about graduate worker experiences, from wages to housing, transportation, and health care. (Note: The demographic questions on the first page—name, email, department/program, and year—will be collected, but the rest of the questions in the survey will be anonymized. All questions are optional, so feel free to answer any/all that you feel comfortable with. We will never share any personal information with University staff, faculty, or administration.)

We hope that by getting as many GW graduate workers to fill out this survey as possible, we can have a better understanding of how many of us are out there and what our wages, stipends, and benefits look like as we work to advocate for better working conditions for all graduate workers! This year, our campaign, GW and a Living Wage, seeks to bring attention to the administration about the struggles that graduate workers face and what a “living wage” might look like for all graduate employees at GW.