Starting in the Fall 2024 semester, full-time graduate assistant students will have access to full coverage ofthe annual graduate student health insurance premium if they do not have any other comparable coverage.
Known as the Wellfleet Health Insurance Plan, benefits apply to full-time graduate assistants, defined as being enrolled full-time (nine credit hours or late-stage doctoral students taking dissertation credits) with a 20-hour/week graduate assistantship contract, which can also apply for multiple contracts that add up to 20 hours per week, that are receiving full tuition, fees and stipends in courses required for their degree programs.
Those who wish to receive benefits must register for classes and sign the graduate assistantship contract.
The announcement comes after a decade-long battle started by United Campus Workers (UCW) for Tennessee.
“Our inaugural efforts began in 2013 with a petition on Change.org, and that culminated with former President David Rudd establishing the Church Health plan, a clinic that focuseson uninsured people,” said Rashid Lawal, a PhD student in biology at U of M. “In 2023, the Wellfleet was announced with no mention of a subsidy. Students who were paying anywhere from $60 to $200 a semester would now be asked to pay around $450 a month. UCW contacted these students and their international organizations, and we got their support on our demand for subsidies.”
“Graduate worker issues are hard to advance because of the high turnover and busy schedules of graduate workers,” said Steph Butera, a UCW member and graduate student worker in the philosophy department, who was heavily involved in organizing UCW’s campaign from 2017 to 2019. “Aside from being too busy to spend time organizing, graduate workers accept sub-par working conditions because they figure they’ll only have to endure them for a few years. Organizing involves a lot of work and risk, and it might not bear fruit in time for the organizer to be able to enjoy it themselves.”
United Campus Workers for Tennessee consists of over 2,200 members, spanning across 20 campuses in the state. According to its official website, the union has aimed to “create positive change for staff and faculty on public colleges and university campuses for over 20 years.”
“We are united in a wall-to-wall union [with] the staff, faculty, graduate and undergraduate workers that make our colleges and universities work,” said Lawal. “We bring our passion and values with us to work in hopes of creating a better world. Students’ learning conditions are our working conditions.”
As previously mentioned, the campaign persisted for over a decade before the university finally granted the benefits for graduate assistants, as announced on January 26. When asked why he felt that this fight took so long, Lawal answered with one word: complacency.
“One faculty member in engineering told us that he was paying for his student’s insurance out-of-pocket because of the daily use of potentially dangerous equipment. The combination of the increased cost of living, pandemic-related health costs and the R1 distinction the university achieved in 2021 put into perspective how behind the university was for higher learning.”
In Lawal’s eyes, the fulfillment of this campaign has shed light on more opportunities for campus employees as a whole because of the amount of work that campus employees have dedicated towards it.
“Although the university has taken every opportunity to not recognize the union despite being comprised of campus employees and having won statewide actions, like preventing the outsourcing of physical plant and janitorial services under Governor Haslam, we understand that our previous actions and connections with graduate student organizations, international student organizations, staff and faculty made this a reality.”
Butera said of the decision, “The provision of health insurance by the employer will vastly improve the material conditions of graduate assistants at the U of M. Even when individual departments are unable to provide adequate stipends, graduate assistants university-wide won’t have to worry about health care costs. This campaign won a precedent that raises the bar for the standard of living for U of M graduate workers in a permanent way.”
More information about the Wellfleet Health Insurance plan can be found at https://www.studentinsurance.com/Client/2268.
More information about how to qualify for the benefits can be found here: Graduate Assistantship Health Benefits - Graduate School - The University of Memphis.
