Connor Chapman – PA – United Steelworkers

My name is Connor Chapman, and I am a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, working on my doctorate in Sociology. Graduate students do essential work for the university: we are the nearly 2,100 teaching and research assistants that make the university work. As academics beginning our careers, we are at the bottom of the academic ladder. We work long and inconsistent hours for poverty wages. For these reasons, among many others, graduate workers at the University of Pittsburgh won a landslide election to join the United Steelworkers, a strong union headquartered in Pittsburgh that represents the rest of the faculty and staff here at the University of Pittsburgh. 

In my experience as a graduate worker and a union organizer, I learned that public transportation is critical for graduate workers to do our jobs. My coworkers and I are lucky that the University provides us with free bus fare through our university IDs. Now, we don’t have to be lucky: we can secure our right to public transportation through a collective bargaining agreement. Guaranteeing access to free transit enables my coworkers to safely access Pittsburgh by connecting us to jobs, grocery stores, hospitals, and child care. These bulk passes have an impact on our communities as well.  As one of the largest employers in Allegheny County, the University of Pittsburgh passes in bulk, providing critical revenue to our county transit agency, Pittsburgh Regional Transit. 

Rising rents and stagnant wages have pushed my coworkers and I farther and farther from the university, year over year. This places graduate workers in a double bind: we are increasingly living in areas under-served by public transit, and we generally struggle to access cars. Many of my coworkers cannot afford the upfront and recurring costs of owning a car. Many others are international students, coming from all across the world to live and work in Pittsburgh, but they don’t have access to a driver’s license. For my coworkers and I, public transportation is the lifeline we need to access work, essential services, and be active members of our communities. 

For this reason, we are also acutely aware of the limitations of Pittsburgh’s public transit service. Improving the frequency, reliability, and scope of Pittsburgh’s public transit system would go a long way to help us become better instructors and researchers. Having a reliable and frequent transit service that gets me to where I need to go would free up a tremendous amount of mental energy I spend worrying if I will arrive to the class I’m teaching on time. Some of my colleagues stay as late as 3 am performing necessary lab work and experiments; they’ve told me that having access to a bus at that hour would be a tremendous relief. Over decades, Pittsburghers have seen their public transit service decline year over year. As service declines, so does ridership. My coworkers want to take the bus, but infrequent and unreliable service are significant barriers. Instead of thinking about service cuts, we should be thinking about restoring service, so that my coworkers and I can continue to perform the quality instruction and groundbreaking research that the University of Pittsburgh is known for. 

After talking to hundreds of my coworkers, one thing is clear: we need to invest in our public transit. As an anchor institution, it is vital that our colleges and universities pay their fare share into our transit system. Through collective bargaining, my coworkers and I can guarantee our access to public transportation while also ensuring that the University of Pittsburgh continues to pay into the county’s public transit system. In addition to local institutions, state and federal funding for public transit is also essential to expanding service. With local, state, and federal support, and the ability to use these funds to expand operations, we can pay our transit workers a family wage. By paying our operators a family wage, we stabilize our transit workforce, which is a critical component in expanding service, increasing frequency and expanding routes. Graduate workers play key roles in keeping our local higher education institutions run and we rely on public transit every day to connect us to work, healthcare, childcare, and our community. Investing in public transportation does not just benefit the health and wellbeing of my coworkers, but for working families, employers, and our communities more broadly.  

Transit keeps our communities connected, enabling us to live and to thrive.