CGPU Misleads in Compensation Gains of Proposed Tentative Agreement
My name is John Chapman, and I am a G5 chemistry graduate student. I have gathered union petition signatures, organized vote parties for union authorization, sent mass emails in support of the union, and spoken in person to most grad students and postdocs in Schlinger, Church, and Crellin for Caltech Grad Researchers and Postdocs United (CGPU). I’m about as pro-union as they come. But right now, CGPU is at best misleading and at worst outright lying about compensation gains in the recent tentative agreement (TA).
First, the facts. In 2021-22, graduate students received a stipend of $38,500. On Dec 14, 2022, following intense unionization efforts at the UC and other schools, the grad student stipend increased to $41,000 for the remainder of the ’22-‘23 academic year with an additional raise to $45,000 to begin in the ‘23-‘24 academic year. Currently, all graduate students at Caltech make at least $45,000. The current TA (1/21/25) proposes a graduate student worker (GSW) minimum of $48,244 to begin on Sep 1, 2025.
However, if you were to look at CGPU literature promoting the passage of the TA, you would believe that the bargaining team began their negotiations at $38,000 (the ‘21-’22 stipend), which is not true. For example, on a flyer circulated this week by CGPU, the “Wages and Compensation” article states “Before the CGPU campaign Launched GSW minimum: $38,500. … After launch, increase in 2024-25 pay: GSW Minimum: $46,500” (an apparent 20% raise). Unfortunately, much of this statement isn’t true. The first campus-wide CGPU email was sent on 12/19/22 (five days after the ‘23-‘24 raises) to announce a kick-off event for the CGPU unionization effort on Jan 20, 2023. While there were certainly pro-unionization undercurrents in late ’22—an off-campus unionization event occurred on 12/9/22—classifying compensation gains that occurred before the union sent any student body-wide emails or officially began their campaign as CGPU wins is questionable.
Furthermore, in the 1/21/25 campus-wide CGPU email announcing that the bargaining team reached a full tentative agreement with Caltech, CGPU included the following bar graph outlining the history of GSW compensation.
Notably missing from this graphic is the ’23-’24 pay—$45,000. Omission of this data point again misleads GSWs into concluding that the union won a 20% pay raise, rather than the modest 3.75% raise actually in the TA (which just beats 3.4% inflation for 2024). This graphic has also been modified to truncate the x-axis, and now begins at $35k rather than $0. This tried-and-true method of misleading data visualization inflates the 3.7% to appear much larger than the small change it actually represents. Why was so much effort made to alter this graphic and mislead GSWs?
Finally, when you include approximately $800 expected in union dues, the TA compensation package again seems like not as good of a deal as CGPU would like us to believe. While the proposed TA has other gains, like those for dependents and international students, so twhy is CGPU attempting to mislead GSWs into believing that we are receiving a much larger raise than we actually are? Is a raise that just keeps pace with inflation the best that the bargaining team could achieve? How would the compensation package shift if we were to strike (as we already authorized in a vote)? For an organization that claims to be transparent, shifting timelines, omitting key data points, and altering graphs to enlarge the appearance of proposed raises is particularly disappointing. I think that a better deal is still out there.