On June 27th, many graduate students on campus received an ominous email titled “Termination Request” sent by Stanford Graduate Workers Union (SGWU) leadership, including Liam Sherman, the Vice-President for Membership, and Orisa Coombs (who signed off on her emails as “UE Local 1043 President”), the president of the SGWU. The emails demanded that university administrators terminat the students immediately for simply failing to pay dues to the Union, as mandated by the recent collective bargaining agreement signed between the University and the student union in 2024.
Some graduate students on campus have objected to joining the student union, which is affiliated with and sends money to the United Electrical Workers (UE), a nationwide union that funds progressive activism. The Union is now attempting to employ aggressive methods of extracting payments from graduate students to the tune of several hundred dollars.