As a first-year master’s student and associate instructor in the School of Music at Indiana University (IU), Chelsea Brinda was forced to sell her blood plasma to survive. Her stipend of just $9,000 was far below Bloomington’s living wage. She eventually stopped selling her biofluids. She got her first creditcard and took out student loans.
Brinda, a Ph.D. student in IU, earns just $16,500 a school year to teach one or two courses per semester. Truthout She finds it difficult to balance her student load and her personal life.
“I feel like I’m shortchanging my students. I’m not giving them the best that I could,” Brinda said. “I’m kind of just going through the motions. I know that if I do try and do better, then it’s going to be a lot more work for myself. That’s not what they’re there for. They don’t deserve that.”
Graduate student workers such as Brinda are often isolated and have little power to address their grievances. In recent years, however, they have been able to build collective power through fighting for and forming unions. A decreased standard of living, heightened political consciousness among students, and the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) landmark rulingThis August 2016, which gave graduate workers at private universities the right of unionization, fueled the rise in labor organizing on campuses. The number of unionized graduates workers grew from 20,000 in 2013 to 83,000 in 2019Between 2016 and 2019, four-fifths joined. In the space of a few weeks, new graduate student unions have been recognized New Mexico State UniversityAt Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Graduate workers are sharing their knowledge with each other across the nation, learning from and improving on their long-term labor organizing efforts.
Maddie Dery, a graduate organizer at MIT, told Truthout that MIT’s union — which officially won recognition through an NLRB election on April 5 — learned to prioritize “closed shop” over “open shop” unionization models from Harvard graduate workers. Harvard’s graduate worker union has an open shopIt is an option to join the union during employment. Students who do not choose to join the union do not have to pay fees. “They’ve at least expressed to us that we should fight as hard as we can to win a closed shop where everyone’s a member of the union,” said Dery. “It really builds a much stronger union to have everybody in it together.”
The movement’s interconnectedness has led to many wins in unionization campaigns. These collaboration channels are informal and not very formal, Dennis M. Hogan (Brown University’s Graduate Labor Organization political director), said. told The Harvard CrimsonHe believes they will become more institutionalized as more and more unions gain recognition and get first contracts.
Valentina Luketa, a IU graduate worker, is fighting for the administration’s recognition of their union, Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition – United Electrical Workers (IGWC UE). Truthout they have been in “constant communication” with other graduate worker unions across the country and graduate workers organizing into unions. “There’s an incredible sense of solidarity and community amongst graduate workers across the country through different conversations about how to establish a local, how to strike, how to campaign effectively and how to build an organization from scratch,” she said.
IGWC-UE relies on inter-union support and collective knowledge to build a strong campaign for unionization recognition. After many years of unsuccessful negotiations with the IU administration regarding wages and fees, workers decided that only a democratic union could change the power balance in their favor. In February 2022, however, university administrators took control. refused IGWC UE is not to be recognized, claiming that graduates workers are not employees. Before striking on April 13, 2022 organizers gathered insight from other graduate workers at Columbia University, University of Michigan and elsewhere. Over 1,000 strikers have received support from over 600 faculty members even Bloomington’s mayor. The strike, which lasted 4 weeks, will be resumed in September.
“This strike has changed Indiana University. Each of us are more courageous than we were four week ago. We are more unified now than we were four weeks ago,” the union wrote in a press release announcing the end of the strike. “Our goals of union recognition, a living wage, and ending the fees are ambitious. We knew we wouldn’t win them all at once. But we will never go back to the years in which graduate employees can just be ignored.”
Their efforts have energized MIT graduate student unionization activists, who are now further along but still have room to grow in terms of engagement. “For them to have had such high turnout at all of their strike votes, and then on top of that over 95 percent of the graduate workers stand together and go on strike together was just amazing for us to see,” said Dery. “Because they have that membership engagement that we’re desiring to reach.”
IGWC-UE will soon set up its local union, elect officers, and create a bargaining commission. UE, a union that uses an organizational model that puts rank-and-file workers at the forefrontA tent organization that connects upwards of 10,000 graduate workers is aimed at connecting them to their own organizations. This allows them to build their own organizations and ensures that workers make the decisions. Luketa explained that IGWC UE worked closely alongside other UE graduate worker branches, such as at the University of New Mexico and at the University of Iowa. Workers at MIT, University of New Mexico and elsewhere phone banked for IU strikesrs and boosted their content via social media. MIT’s UE branch held workshops, including a media training session, with IU graduate workers and learned how to run a card campaign (a drive to form a union) from the UE branch at University of New Mexico.
Similarly, the Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees and Brown University’s Graduate Labor Organization (GLO) are closest to each other because they share the same parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers. Workers from different unions also show solidarity. Graduate workers from Harvard, New York University and Brown University’s unions joined Columbia students at their picket lineMarch 2021
These efforts are also reverberating outside of the educational sphere, serving to channel worker struggles into other industries. Dery said that MIT graduate workers have had discussions with workers at a local Starbucks that is unionizing. After learning how to organize at universities and how to collectively struggle, workers are bringing this ethos into their future jobs. Tech, for example, was once seen as unorganized due to the high wages of their employees. Luketa and others point out that these types workers are increasingly demanding democratic control of what their industries produce.
“Changing MIT for the better is just the tip of the iceberg; we are organizing a union for a better world,” MIT graduate worker organizers wrote in The Tech. “For many of us, these lessons won’t end at MIT. We are scientists, technologists, designers, artists, writers, and tinkerers, and we will spend our post-MIT careers working at cutting edge technology institutions all over the world — from global biotech firms like Moderna or Pfizer to bootstrap startups building the future of the internet.”
Many graduate students believe fighting for a better world is fighting against the capitalistic forces, which, as Luketa said, are infecting the university’s heart and soul. “The general mission of a university should be to invest in education, to improve research, to contribute to horizons of knowledge, to improve the world,” she explained. “That’s how many of us see our role…. I’m really hopeful that that kind of continuous collective action can reclaim the missions of the university, and really stop this for-profit trend that we have been observing the last couple of decades.”
