Across the country, collective action is working to expand rights for these exploited workers.
AUGUST 16, 2021
Harvard University students on the picket line on Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 3, 2019.
This spring, unionized graduate students at New York University demanded a $46 hourly wage. That was more than double what the lowest paid graduate student was earning, which was $20 an hour. The number came from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator, which seeks to “determine a local wage rate that allows residents to meet minimum standards of living.”
The university countered with a $1 raise for master’s students and a $2 raise for doctoral students. In response, students went on strike. More than a thousand stopped performing their work duties, including serving as teaching assistants and grading papers. As a result of their three-week strike, the university returned to the bargaining table. The contract that was later ratified contained a $26-an-hour wage for the lowest paid employees, which will go up to $30 an hour by the final year of the contract.
Meanwhile, at Harvard, according to Harvard Graduate Students Union–United Automobile Workers President Brandon Mancilla, graduate worker organizers negotiating for their second contract have so far been offered no raise at all in their contract’s first year. Harvard has offered only a bonus for those who worked last year and will work next. Given the high turnover in higher education, this proposal would leave out a sizable portion of the bargaining unit.
And Harvard’s proposal of a 2 percent raise over the next two years would not even keep up with the rate of inflation or the cost of living in the Boston metropolitan area. With their contract having expired on June 30, Mancilla told me in a phone interview that the union and the school were still very far apart on compensation, among other issues. On June 24, the union announced that more than 500 student workers had signed a letter committing to organizing a strike.
The Union for Graduate Employees on strike at New York University.
Universities rely on poorly paid graduate student and adjunct labor for work like grading and the teaching of introductory level undergraduate courses. This is the grunt work of academia, the work that scholars eagerly throw off if they are lucky enough to get a tenure-track position. The system has always been unjust and precarious and has only become more so in recent decades, when three-quarters of all instructional jobs filled in American universities have become nonpermanent positions.
Graduate student unions seek to restore power and control to this class of workers. But having a union to back you up is the exception rather than the rule for graduate students in the United States.
Since the first teaching assistants’ union was recognized at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1969, only about forty graduate student unions have been organized around the nation. Today, four out of five graduate students are not unionized. They endure low wages and poor working conditions.
For students in expensive cities like New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, rent—sometimes even for university-owned housing—can exceed half of what a graduate student earns in a year. James Boocock, a University of California, Los Angeles, graduate student in human genetics, earns $34,000 a year as a student researcher and pays $1,500 in rent each month, or $18,000 each year. “The cost of living is extremely expensive here,” Boocock told me in a phone interview. “It’s one of the most expensive zip codes in the country.” Despite increased rents, however, universities are slow to move on even marginal increases in student wages.
Historically, graduate labor has been seen not as labor but as a form of apprenticeship: students spend years acquiring the skills of their profession before, hopefully, taking on the full weight of a tenure-track position. While many universities still peddle this narrative, the increasing lack of job security in academia—spurred by the “adjunctification” of U.S. universities—has made this myth harder to maintain.
The reality is that it has been decades since a Ph.D. guaranteed you a secure, middle-class life. Now, for most graduate workers, their apprenticeships never end. After getting their degrees, scholars who remain in academia shift from teaching assistants to contingent faculty, retaining the poor salaries, brutal schedules, and substandard housing of their student days.
Graduate Workers of Columbia union members picket on March 17, 2021.
While graduate workers have always been exploited, harassed, and discriminated against, the universal proletarianization of academic labor and the soaring costs of living in U.S. cities have heightened the need for unions, including those for graduate students. The pandemic, which hit academic workers hard, underscored this even more. The switch to Zoom classes, for example, required many hours of extra labor, most of which went uncompensated.
The push for union representation by graduate students has also been buoyed by the National Labor Relations Board’s decision in March to withdraw its Trump-era ruling that graduate students at private universities were students, not employees, and therefore lacked bargaining rights.
Since 2020, graduate worker unions at Brown, Harvard, American, and Georgetown Universities have won contracts, doubling the number of private school unions. Unorganized workers at public universities—including teaching assistants at the University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University, and student researchers across the University of California system—are currently organizing and preparing for contract negotiations.
Students on strike at New York University attend a rally on April 30, 2021.
Despite the grim state of the job market, graduate schools have not shrunk the number of students admitted. It is in the best interest of these schools to keep their surplus labor pools enormous, even as academic positions and even whole departments are excised for the sake of the bottom line. Having thousands apply to the same tenure-track job leaves thousands willing, and even grateful, to take up precarious contingent faculty jobs.
However, these students—now apprenticed to an increasingly uncertain profession—are getting proactive about their own bottom line, and trying to get what they rightly deserve for their labor. They are figuring out that delaying the fulfillment of one’s needs as a functioning adult in anticipation of a tenured payoff is no longer a luxury they can afford.
Organizational strategies vary somewhat between public and private schools; some public school graduate workers, for instance, cannot legally go on strike. But the demands of these workers for higher wages and against power-based harassment are essentially the same across the nation.
Also universal are the strategies of university administrations. They routinely stonewall in contract negotiations and hire union-busting law firms (such as the infamous Proskauer Rose) to defang contracts, gaslight students and organizers, and attempt to crush union drives.
And yet, despite administrators’ spending astronomical sums on union-busting efforts, student organizers have successfully countered these strategies through solidarity building and deep, one-on-one rank-and-file strategies in newly formed unions.
As a general rule, corporatized modern universities are unlikely to voluntarily give up administrative power, especially when it’s to improve the living conditions of their lowest-paid academic employees. They depend on the discipline induced by poor wages and working conditions to maintain a top-down administrative structure.
Focusing more on long-term financial gains than on education, university administrations choose to spend more on union-busting lawyers than raising workers’ wages. And the law firms they hire often lean into the paternalistic framework of the apprenticeship model of graduate studies to bust unions and break the bonds of solidarity among students.
New York University, just prior to the recent graduate union strike, sent a letter to students’ parents calling the strike misguided and the union’s demands unreasonable. Language that treats a bargaining unit of thousands of members like misbehaving children is common practice among school administrators dealing with graduate unions.
And this infantilizing language is often paired with cruel actions. At Columbia University, graduate workers on strike had to create a GoFundMe campaign after Columbia threatened to dock money from striking students’ bank accounts—money that they had received as a lump sum earlier in the year. In early 2020, wildcat strikers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, were arrested while picketing; eighty-two of them were summarily fired, losing their health insurance at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Of that number, only half were reinstated in August of that year—and that only happened because the union kept pushing the university for a settlement.
In response, unions have employed deep organizing to maintain union solidarity. The organizers at NYU, who recently won a second contract for their graduate student union, started surveying their membership a full year before negotiations began. Union stewards went from department to department asking students what their needs were. Hundreds of phone banking hours were logged in one-on-one calls with the membership.
The United Graduate Workers of the University of New Mexico filed their union cards with the New Mexico Public Employee Labor Relations Board in 2020. In 2021 the school filed a motion with the board to dismiss recognition of the union. Organizers are still waiting on the results of their hearing, but in the meantime they continue to have students sign union cards. They are determined to keep fighting, whatever the result.
“The hearing doesn’t decide whether or not we’re a union,” said Alana Bock, a Ph.D. student in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. “We’ve decided, 1,000 of us have decided we’re a union. We’ve talked to the administration, we’ve gone to Board of Regents meetings, and we let them know that regardless of what the hearing decides, our union isn’t going anywhere.”