Thirty years ago, UE organized its first graduate worker local at the University of Iowa. Since then, UE has negotiated contracts at 11 universities and has graduate worker members at 12 chartered locals.
Graduate workers are students in masters or doctoral programs who work in labs, do research, teach, grade papers for undergraduate classes, or work in offices at the university they are enrolled in. The work they do is vital in keeping their respective universities running – teaching hundreds of classes each semester and providing vital research that contributes to their universities’ ability to attract funding. Their wages are rarely sufficient to live on. Many are subjected to harassment by their supervisors, who are often also their academic advisors.
The graduate workers at universities across the country have similar issues to all workers: their wages are not enough to live on and they need a meaningful grievance procedure, adequate health and safety protections, and protections against discrimination and harassment. All of them need a union, and over the last 30 years, many have chosen to join UE.
The First UE Graduate Worker Local
On April 16, 1996, graduate research and teaching assistants at the University of Iowa (UI) voted to certify UE as their collective bargaining agent. This was a major victory for labor organizing in Iowa, which has been a right to work state since 1947, and marked the beginning of graduate worker organizing at UE.
Sporadic unionization efforts by graduate workers at UI were seen as early as the 1960s, but did not gain serious traction until the 1990s, a period of aggressive graduate worker organizing throughout the United States. At Iowa, teaching assistants in the History, English and Rhetoric departments began agitating against overwork and infringements on academic freedom. Across campus, graduate workers suffered from inadequate health insurance, lack of tuition coverage, low pay, lack of child care and parental leave, poor working conditions, and discrimination. In the spring of 1993 the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students (COGS) was formed to address these concerns. That fall, COGS voted to affiliate with SEIU Local 150 out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and began the fight to unionize. COGS/SEIU faced a fierce anti-union campaign backed by the university, and lost the representation election by just 70 votes in the spring of 1994.
Following this defeat, COGS and SEIU parted ways, but graduate workers at UI continued their efforts to organize. COGS eventually found its home with UE in fall 1995, with members choosing to affiliate with UE due to its history of rank-and-file unionism and commitment to civil rights and racial equality. Over the course of that academic year, COGS–with assistance of UE staff–used UE’s rank-and-file organizing model and worker testimony to build a powerful campaign, eventually recruiting over 1200 members. By spring 1996 they were ready for another certification attempt, this time winning the election 949 to 667. UE Local 896-COGS became the official bargaining unit for over 2,600 graduate workers at the University of Iowa. The benefits were immediate–before contract negotiations even began, the union reached an agreement with the Iowa Board of Regents to raise base salaries from $10,500 to $12,500 for half-time academic year appointments.
Members of UE Local 896 grade the University of Iowa administration’s progress in meeting graduate workers’ needs at a grade-in during negotiations for a first contract,
But the fight wasn’t over. Throughout the next academic year, COGS pressured the university for a fair contract, holding grade-ins and rallies. The first contract was ratified in February 1997 and included several important victories, such as a comprehensive healthcare plan, guaranteed base pay, and provisions for sick leave, family leave, and time off during semester breaks. One critical issue was the University's refusal to include a no-discrimination clause in the contract. COGS responded by marching on campus during the University's Martin Luther-King Day celebrations, to highlight the administration's hypocrisy. Grievance procedures for discrimination were eventually won in COGS second contract.
Local 896 picket line, late 1990s.
In 2002-2003, COGS won partial tuition scholarships for all teaching and research assistants. By 2011 this was expanded to full tuition scholarships. Today, graduate workers at the University of Iowa have 100 percent of their tuition and 50 percent of academic fees covered thanks to the union.
COGS and other public sector unions in Iowa faced a major setback in 2017, when the Republican-led legislature enacted sweeping changes to Iowa Code Chapter 20, the state’s public-sector collective bargaining law, making it one of the most restrictive such laws in the country. The reconfigured law mandates public-sector unions recertify before each contract negotiation, limits bargaining topics, and caps arbitration awards on wages to three percent or the regional consumer price index, whichever is lower. Despite these attempts to weaken unions, COGS remains a force to be reckoned with on campus. The union has recertified with large margins every two years since 2017, and this past spring won a historic six percent raise – the first time a public-sector union in Iowa received above the legal minimum from the Board of Regents since Chapter 20 was gutted.
Today UE Local 896-COGS is focused on winning higher pay for graduate workers, ending all student fees, and defending academic freedom on campus. The local will be celebrating its 30-year anniversary on April 18.
Struggles at the University of Minnesota
In 2005, UE attempted to organize the graduate workers at the University of Minnesota (UMN). The campaign would be the third unsuccessful unionizing effort in a string of five failures before UE would eventually succeed in 2023. Before UE entered the scene in 2005, UMN graduate workers had tried to unionize in 1974 and 1999. Each time, the loss was due to heavy anti-union campaigns by the university that targeted STEM (“Science, Technology, Engineering and Math”) departments and research assistants.
In a 2005 UE NEWS article, the effort was described as “a competent and often exciting 10-month campaign that drew inspiration from our experience in Iowa, where UE Local 896 has compiled a record of solid achievement in the nearly nine years as the representative of more than 2,500 graduate employees at the University of Iowa.” In the same article, the strong anti-union stance of the university was said to be indicative of a troubled organizing climate. Following the 2005 effort, two more labor unions tried to organize the graduate workers at UMN. The most recent drive before the 2023 UE campaign took place in 2012, when the loss was four percent higher than 2005. The sixth time was the charm when the UE-affiliated UMN Graduate Labor Union (GLU) won 97 percent of the vote in 2023.
A New Wave of Organizing
In 2020, a new wave of graduate worker organizing began. Graduate workers at the University of New Mexico (UNM) hit the ground running at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic because they were dissatisfied with how university administrators were treating them. When it came time to affiliate with a union, UNM graduate workers turned to UE because of the union’s militant and progressive stances. The workers also saw that UE had experience with graduate workers at COGS and in North Carolina where University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University graduate workers had begun organizing with UE Local 150.
The United Graduate Workers of UNM were met with a tough union-busting campaign by the university which took them into a year-long fight at the state labor board. In December 2021, the 1,547 bargaining unit employees were certified to have collective bargaining rights. The victory was UE’s largest organizing win in 25 years.
Local 1466 members rallying for a contract, September 2021.
Not long after, in May 2022, 900 graduate workers at New Mexico State University won union certification from the state labor board after their own card campaign. The two New Mexico locals, UGW-UE Local 1466 and GWU-UE Local 1498, both ratified first contracts in December 2022.
Local 1498 members demand tuition coverage, March 2022.
Locals 1466 and 1498 have since settled second contracts and are now in the midst of contract reopeners to bargain for wage increases. Local 1498 is coming off of a huge tuition win and will also be negotiating for a better reimbursement system for their members.
Change in NLRB Status
Like their counterparts at public universities, graduate workers at private universities face insufficient benefits and sometimes abusive and precarious professional environments. However, their legal right to organize under the NLRB was not guaranteed until the 2016 Columbia decision, which was in danger of being overturned by the Trump labor board during his first term. It was only with the election of Biden in 2020 that graduate workers at private universities had a clear path to winning a union contract.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was an unlikely university to kick off a wave of private higher education victories. Conventional wisdom at the time was that scientists and engineers were more resistant to collective action than social scientists and humanities workers. But on MIT’s science-dominated campus, workers had already begun independently organizing. In 2019, under the banner of “Grad Students for a Healthy MIT,” grad workers secured free mental health services to address the widespread mental health crisis on campus. Worker leaders saw the power of collective action, but realized they needed a union to win durable economic gains and worker protections. So they turned towards winning an even bigger prize: recognition of the MIT-Graduate Student Union, UE Local 256.
Local 256 members launching their union drive, fall 2021.
On April 6, 2022, despite facing a heavy-handed anti-union campaign from the administration, MIT grad workers voted by a two to one margin to form their union. Using worker-to-worker organizing tactics learned from independent organizing and seasoned UE organizers, grad workers turned out thousands of their coworkers to the polls to vote for their union. But the real fight had only just begun. In the first contract fight, grad workers were fighting for not only bread-and-butter economic issues such as higher wages and dental insurance, but also international student benefits, protections from harassment and discrimination, laboratory health and safety, and securing a union shop. The day before the union’s rally to announce strike preparations, MIT settled a contract that conceded to all the MIT-GSU’s major demands. Decisive worker power secured better jobs, dignity, and respect for MIT graduate workers.
UE locals in other sectors have been critical in growing and spreading the union’s presence in higher education. UE Local 506 offered their decades of experience to train the first MIT-GSU executive board, who in turn, provided guidance to new higher-ed UE locals as they won their first contracts. Riding off the successive wins of first-contract higher-ed campaigns, MIT-GSU Local 256 is about to enter bargaining for their second contract.
A Snowball Effect
After Local 256 (MIT-GSU) was formed, graduate workers at other private universities around the country began organizing with UE. After each successful campaign, strategies were improved and experience was used on the next organizing effort. In early 2023, graduate workers at Northwestern, Johns Hopkins and UChicago all won their union elections by margins of over 90 percent. The UMN GLU launched its card drive in February 2023, and by the end of April they had won their state labor board election — by a margin of 97 percent, a huge feat after five previous election losses. Also that year, graduate workers at Dartmouth, Stanford, and Cornell all joined UE, winning their elections by 89 percent, 94 percent, and 96 percent respectively. In 2023 alone, over 20,000 graduate workers were brought into UE. More impressively, all the organizing campaigns were run by the workers themselves with minimal assistance from UE staff.
Graduate workers took it upon themselves to share ideas and problem-solve with each other from campaign to campaign. Members from different locals, such as Locals 1466 and 1498, participated in phonebanking for new organizing efforts at other universities. A “Graduate Worker Organizing Committee” was formed where members regularly met over Zoom to train other workers at different campuses. Now, a more formal Higher Education Labor Council within UE exists for the locals to discuss organizing and political action.
Graduate worker successes have also kicked off UE organizing efforts among postdocs, workers who have graduated with a doctoral degree and work at universities as scientists, academic research staff, and other positions that can last from one to five years. At Northwestern University, postdocs organized and won a union for 1,300 workers who are now represented by Northwestern University Postdoc Union (NUPU-UE) Local 1151. Another group of higher education workers, academic research staff at Johns Hopkins, are organizing with Research and Lab Labor Empowered (RALLE-UE) to improve their working conditions.
All of the UE efforts and successes in this great wave of higher education organizing started in Iowa 30 years ago and is far from over.