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- There are 15,000 graduate students at U of T, of whom about 6,000 are currently on strike.
- The poverty line in Toronto was $23,298 for a single adult with no dependents in 2011.
- Just under 3,900 new Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grants were awarded in 2013-14. In that same year there were 61,530 masters and PhD students in the "social sciences and humanities research community."
- Graduate students are guaranteed a minimum funding package of their tuition plus $15,000 for the first four to five years of their studies, depending on the department. After that, they have to pay both living expenses and full tuition either out of pocket or from whatever teaching and research positions they're able to secure.
- Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) 3902 Unit 1 is on strike right now. Unit 1 represents all students and post-doctoral fellows employed at U of T in teaching capacities.
Quite frankly, you can only survive in this program by incurring a lot of debt. I ran out of money last summer. I was like, 'I don't know how I'm supposed to pay rent or eat or do anything for the next four months.' When you're getting lump sums of grant money in September and January, and you're only making wages in between, it's really hard to make ends meet. After April I won't get any money again until September. But you also can't apply for EI, because you're still technically a student over the summer. So I end up taking the lump sum in September and paying down whatever debt I incurred over the summer, and then I don't end up actually keeping any money out of the January amount, because I use it to pay my tuition for both semesters.
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I'm from California, which is a fairly expensive place to live. So when I came here, I thought, "OK. I can live on the funding package. I can make do. Plus, Toronto's probably not that expensive, right?" Well, no. I've discovered that's not the case. Living on $15,000 has meant that I have really had to actively restrict how I live my life. In my first year here, if I was invited out to eat with my friends, I would tuck a cheap protein bar in my pocket and have that at the restaurant, and just say that I wasn't hungry.It's also meant that I've had to live in housing that is what I would consider substandard. I had to look for a very long time to find something that was not only reasonable in price but also reasonable in quality. And I am a PhD student, I'm a mature student. I just turned 40. It's just not the way that I'm used to living. When summer came around after my first year, I came awfully close to actually running out of money, and I became very distressed. Fortunately, a good friend of mine allowed me to move in with her. She had this small little bedroom and offered it to me. Which was great, but otherwise I don't know what I would have done. I was saved by her good graces.
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If you're doing ethnographic work like I am, you have to do about two years of fieldwork. So my program does two years of coursework; the third year is your comprehensive examination; and then your fourth and fifth years are in the field. So your funding runs out before you even begin to write your dissertation, which takes a few years. I'm in year seven. In order to support myself, I had to teach courses, which obviously held me back. So the position of students, particularly upper-year students who are out of the funded cohort, is particularly dire. We have to pay tuition, and we're not funded, and we have to support ourselves.A lot of us have families, and a lot of us are also at the same time trying to apply for post-docs. In recent years there's been an influx of new PhDs, [but] there are not enough tenure-track positions at universities for everybody. So a lot of us have to look for something called a post-doctorate: you're not a student, you're not faculty. You're there for a year or two to do research. You get a stipend and often you have to teach a course or two. Because it takes a very long time between the time of applying for a post-doc and the final stages of being accepted anywhere, a lot of us are applying while we're still "ABD," which is all-but-dissertation. So we're still in the process of writing our dissertations while we're going through the process of these applications.Surviving on $15,000 in Toronto is pretty much impossible. I was lucky because one year, when I was still funded, I taught a course, and because of my contract a portion of that pay was on top of my funding. But it is incredibly hard to survive on that little, even if you have a top up like I had that one year. Looking back, I have no idea how I did this. I have no idea.The $15,000 the university offers in funding, that's not free money: you have to work as a teaching assistant for a certain portion. Sometimes you manage to get a little more in terms of internal rewards: $2,000 here, $3,000 there. I had a SSHRC, which was $20,000, but it's not like you get $20,000 in addition to your funding. I'm basically not seeing that money, it just looks nice on my resume. Every year, I take out a student loan. I get the maximum amount, which is about $18,000, which of course is still not enough to live on and pay tuition. So I need to TA, I need to teach courses. Last year I did both at the same time, TA and teach a course, which of course left zero time for me to write.I think that the problem is obviously systemic. It's not just about $2,000 less or $2,000 more. It really is about living wages: what is a living wage in Toronto, and why are no graduate students making them? No graduate students I know are ever, ever making any kind of living wage. Why are we doomed to be steeped in debt for many years to come? Why don't the funding packages actually correspond to the average number of years it takes to finish a PhD program? Those are just a few of the questions that need to be addressed. And I think this strike in particular is really about the university trying to break organized labour on campus, and we're trying to respond and not lose this war of attrition.Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.