Weapon number one: we want the raise in the scholarship and we want it now! Blast of emails

 From the SEGEL TRFO organization (mail sent on 02.08.23)

Hello,   At the end of June this year the organization sent a demand to the Director General of the University to increase scholarships by 12.5% in the upcoming academic year for all recipients, except postdoctoral fellows for whom we demanded more. This, in accordance with the increase of the average salary between 2021-2023, and taking into account that 2021 was the last year in which scholarships were updated according to the Consumer Price Index, which continues to rise. For Postdoctoral fellows who have not received any compensation, and whose scholarships remained stagnant for several years, the organization demanded a double raise of 25% as well as raising of the minimal scholarships level to 200% (which is currently 100% for Israeli postdocs and 150% for international postdocs). A full postdoctoral scholarship for researchers with a PhD currently amounts to only 5,723 ILS per month, which is slightly above the minimum wage but with no social benefits.    The University is supposed to decide about increasing the scholarships this week. Our experience during the past year has shown that without organized pressure on our part the odds that management will act in our favor are low. Help us influence that decision and enter this link (CHECK BELOW ON THE UPDATE) to send a pre-prepared mail to management. Yours, The Teaching and Research Faculty Organization

Brief explanation of the context of this email

You should have received such email in your mailbox, from SEGEL/TRFO, the "labor union" of the scholars (i.e. students and postdocs who receive a scholarship). 

Previously, thanks to your opinions and support, we managed to design some strategies to put some pressure on the administration of TAU regarding the raise of the scholarship.

This raise is important for all of us in order to cope with the rampant increasing of the CPI(Consumer price index) and the inflation, alongside the fact that we live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. The university previously promised the 5% increase, which is actually not enough considering the current situation. We are pushing for the +12.5% for all of the students, so that we can cover the inflation costs. This is actually hard to achieve if the demands are shy. Therefore, we decided to take action with different initiatives.

The actions we are launching are:

• Social media campaign
• collection of testimony from people in the international community
• Collaboration with the local press
• Physical protest on the campus
• massive emailing towards TAU administration 

The first project ongoing is the massive emailing towards TAU administration, which is exactly the content of the email from SEGEL.

If you are willing to help, please click on the link above (highlighted in yellow) to send a pre-written letter to the recipients. Your email will be one of the many that the administration will receive in these days. Thanks to SEGEL initiative, the email campaign is supported also by the Israeli scholars of TAU and we expect that hundreds of people will email the administration.

Big numbers are also a protection for which everybody participating in this action is protected against any reaction (i.e. these people don't have time and interest in checking on the email and personal details of hundreds of people, and there is still SEGEL to take responsibilities for this action).

Anyway, if you don't feel like doing it, you can still participate in other activities we are preparing in the next days. Some of them have a higher privacy level, if you are concerned.

Please, text me or Bhavana to get further information and try to support our action also by sharing this initiative!

UPDATE

we were reported that the recipients of the email have blocked the contents and the senders of it, as long as the email was sent with the @mail.tau.ac.il domain. To tackle this issue, you can use another address with another domain instead.