TL;DR: We need a contract before Trump can re-enact regressive policies. RSVP for our Mass Membership Meeting on November 19th, 5 pm on Parsons-Gates Lawn to show the Caltech administration that we will not wait.
I, like many of you, am processing the results of Tuesday night’s general election. We don’t know the full extent of what this will mean for immigrants, the labor movement, and members of CGPU. But we can extrapolate from the last Trump term: he and his administration attacked the visa statuses of international student workers. But unions fought back—when Chinese students were restricted to 1-year visa validity, UAW academic workers, along with Judy Chu and other members of Congress, pushed back.
We know we can keep each other safe, as we’ve done in the past. If the Trump administration returns to their 2019 policies, international scholar visa renewal will become much more complex. It is expected that the Trump administration will try to renew restrictions on OPT. Other academic unionshave contracts that guarantee days off for visa-related appointments, but Caltech administration has so far resisted our proposals for the same. They have also not responded to our proposals on wages and healthcare—promising to try to respond in mid-October, then late-October, then November, and now maybe December…
Under the last Trump administration, the NLRB proposed rules that would have prevented Graduate Student Workers at private institutions, like us, from unionizing. A second Trump administration could pose a direct threat to the NLRB’s ability to protect union activities. We cannot wait—we need a contract NOW. Come to the Mass Membership Meeting (MMM) on Tuesday, November 19th at 5 pm on Parsons-Gates Lawn and show that you, like me, are ready to stand up for a ratified, enforceable contract.
In solidarity,
Chenyu Jiang
Graduate Student Worker, Chemistry