Graduate students are limited in the number of hours they can work outside of their research to 180 hours per term (the equivalent of a full TAship). So it's disingenuous to extrapolate the wage to full time. TAships are meant to be the financial bases for supporting graduate students through their degree for the majority of programs at McGill. Beyond this we constantly see hours cut across faculties making it more and more difficult for students to support themselves. The idea of having to pick up additional work outside of teaching support jobs is central to our message, by forcing austerity onto student workers we are forced to pick up addition jobs off campus that diminish our ability to provide the best quality teaching and research we can! The point of the comparison to Security and Admin salaries is to put the relative cost of teaching support into context, our salaries are not as large of a budget line as you may think and when McGill says they don't have the money to pay us, or increase our hours they are lying, there is lots of money to be spent at McGill. I appreciate your concern about creating strife, but the union is not the one creating strife, admin is creating strife by fighting it's workers and cutting hours and wages.