 For more videos on People's Juggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. My name is Johanna. I am a PhD student in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University and I'm out here today on strike. We are striking for a living wage for neutral third-party arbitration in cases of sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and power-based bullying, and also for comprehensive healthcare that includes dental and vision. I think a lot of us see what we're doing as part of a broader labor movement. We're the second biggest strike in the country right now, right behind John Deere, which is also part of our parent union UAW, and I at least see us as part of the same fight. I think a lot of workers right now going through strike tober, strikes giving, see each other as comrades in the labor movement. As far as I'm concerned, a win in one workplace is a win in others, and obviously there are different particulars in different workplaces. I never want to pretend that we're all going through the exact same thing, but I think that there are a couple things that make this kind of fight an appointed part of the labor movement, even if it's a one that a lot of people wouldn't consider a traditional part of the labor movement. One of those is this is an elite institution, and I think workers everywhere are just tired of elites thinking that they can boss everyone else around. If President of the University, Lee Bollinger, thinks that just because we're grad students, we're going to let him do whatever he wants to us, he has another thing coming. That's the kind of attitude adjustment that people who make millions or even billions of dollars a year across the country need to be going through. This is one of the places where we can really kind of show them that they're wrong, and it's time for that attitude adjustment. But the other thing is, I really think that graduate education needs to be accessible to everybody, so it's really important to me that if somebody at John Deere wants to go to graduate school or wants to send their kid to graduate school or very likely they're somebody's kid from a manufacturing plant like John Deere is a college student at Columbia right now, I want them to have access to that kind of education without feeling like their own livelihood is it jeopardy just because they don't come from generational wealth. And so that's one of the things I'm out here fighting for that I think a lot of us are out here fighting for. As an international student with an F1 visa, I am not allowed to work at least this year more than 20 hours beyond the scope of Columbia, if that makes sense. So the only way that I can really get money here is through the stipend as well as through the TA position. And I do want to make it clear that this year Columbia did change the pay structure of the way that we receive our stipend. So it used to be that at the beginning of the semester, we would receive a lump sum of around I believe nine or ten thousand and this year we received only two thousand from the get-go and it would be kind of interspersed throughout the semester but actually they're holding withholding not only TA pay but also stipend pay for people that are striking. We have been on strike, this is our second strike in two academic calendar years. We were on strike last spring as well and we just didn't make enough progress in bargaining. We got a tentative agreement out of that but the unit voted it down for being insufficiently strong on issues like compensation and you know the unit knows what it wants and so that's why we're not stopping until we get it. So we're out here again, we're going to keep coming out here until we get what we need. Um well personally being an undergrad I have classes with TAs and I see how hard they work and um being out here on the picket line talking to people on strike like hearing their stories and how much work they put into their jobs and how little the university values their work just really inspires me to stand in solidarity with them.