The incoming graduate student government executives plan on creating a partnership between the student workers union to protect against incoming budget cuts.
Bronwyn Valentine and Shae Ortega, the incoming president and vice president of the WSU Graduate and Professional Student Association next year, both have experience working with the student union.
“This union-GPSA partnership is, I think, what I’m most excited for,” Ortega said.
The union will be renegotiating its initial collective bargaining contract this year. Valentine and Ortega said collaboration is the best way to protect student workers.
“The kind of argument is that GPSA protects us as students, and then our union can protect us as workers,” Valentine said. “By combining that power, then we can kind of fight things on both sides.”
They said the cooperation will also help protect against action by the federal government harming higher education research.
“It’s really important that we find a way to defend ourselves at this moment in time,” Ortega said. “We’re really just bleeding funding right now. The only way that we’re going to be able to preserve that is to stand strong.”
Valentine said there is some contention between the two groups due to the overlap in who they represent. Valentine blames the university administration for the split.
“I really feel like these divides that have kept us from working together are really much constructed by the people in power,” she said. “They are so aware that if we were to work together, like we should, then we would be so much more unstoppable.”
Something else they plan on focusing on is food security, a topic also brought up in the ASWSU election.
Valentine and Ortega want to establish a native food forest on campus to help feed students. They are also going to push to request $100,000 from the state government to help address food insecurities across the WSU system.
“Food security is pretty much going to be the most important thing right now,” Ortega said. “If there’s any kind of stability that we can attach ourselves to, it’s our food security scene.”
