Welcome to the Academic Union Network! We are Master’s, doctoral students, and postdocs from different universities across North America. We are both academic workers and union organizers at our respective schools. As university workers, most of us have a salary that is not enough to cover our expenses and suffer under the oppression of the academic system. In recent years, more and more Chinese students have participated in academic union organizing. We have witnessed how academic workers, especially international students, are exploited in the capitalist European and American higher education system, and have realized that it is only through the persistent daily organizing work of uniting colleagues from different backgrounds around us that we can fight for the labor rights and secure livelihoods that university workers deserve.
Currently, however, the participation of Chinese students in academic labor unions is still very limited, and the rights and interests of international students are often not taken seriously in unions. Therefore, we hope that by establishing a North American cross-campus union exchange and resource-sharing platform, more Chinese students will have the opportunity to understand and participate in union organizing. We hope that through union organizing, Chinese students, together with domestic and other immigrant communities, will be able to participate in American politics in ways closely related to their own interests, to challenge the elitist perception of college students, and to break the limitations of viewing American politics based on separate national identities: we are all part of the workforce at colleges and universities, and only by connecting more academic workers across separate ethnic identities can we fight for the rights we deserve!
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