19.07.23 Meeting with the scholars of the International Community on the next steps to take for the scholarships and rights campaign

Yesterday 19.07.23 three SEGEL representatives (Tuvaal, Elinor, Valentina) met some international scholars (mostly post-doc, but also PhDs). There were 10 people present, among them our team member Bhavana, who is kindly helping and supporting our campaign.

We decided to focus on the following topics:

• Status of the scholarships and compensations
• The meeting between the postdocs and the VP of research and development and the VP of the International scholars
• Next steps to take in order to escalate or progress with the campaign

At first, Tuvaal gave us a summary of the current situation: the various demands have been forwarded to the administration body of the University. In particular, the chairperson of SEGEL (Shachar) has reached out the CEO of the University, presenting three demands:

• increase of the Master and PhD students scholarships of 12.5% (percentage set according to the current status quo in Israel, resembling the general increase of salaries in the country due to the CPI);
• increase of the the Postdocs scholarship of 25% (percentage set according to the fact that for several years there was no adjustment of scholarship to the CPI, neither the previous ones);
• equalization of the Israelis and International postdocs' scholarships, as so far the Israeli postdocs receive less amount of money.

As far as the one-time bonus compensation for the raise of the CPI is regarded, the university is not willing to change its policy and it insists saying that the bonus was calculated correctly and everyone got what they deserved.

A few hours before the meeting, we got an email from Dan Pe'er, the Vice President of the Research and development of TAU. He agreed with meeting a few postdocs representatives, alongside Valentina and Tuvaal. After a brief discussion, we decided to opt for the August the 14th between 13.00 and 17.00, place to be determined. This implicitly means that the meeting will take place after the TAU administration committee has met, lowering our chance to negotiate a deal within their decision period.

Given this situation, we brainstormed a series of initiative to gather more attention and scale up the campaign.

We spoke about preparing a petition (online) to ask for some more support and to collect the opinion of the scholars on how we should proceed further.

At the same time, we are trying to spread out the survey prepared by SEGEL to collect as much data as possible on the national level situation on the University scholarship amounts.

Later on, in the next weeks, there will be some action by which posters will be hung around the university to raise the awareness on the scholarship raise campaign. It was proposed to create English posters and to add some blank space where people can sign to support the action.

Alongside these ideas, we suggested to:

• create an email with some general text to be sent massively to a specific recipient in TAU administration;
• call the press and offer a story about how an international scholar lives the university and the city;
• create social media campaign where we can "attack" the official channels of TAU, or we can open a specific channel where we can report the problems and make demands in a public space;

 Given this situation, we decided to proceed with the petition and to update each other in a few days, to lead and execute these ideas.

For any inquiry, ideas, criticism etc please contact us.