After 2,000 graduate workers committed to strike, UE local 1103 (GSU-UE) won a strong and historic contract with the University of Chicago (UChicago). Membership ratified the contract on March 28, after 10 months of negotiations with UChicago’s administration.
“After 17 years of campus organizing, UChicago now has a federally-recognized, contract-protected, and rank-and-file organized graduate student union over 3,000 strong,” said Michael Stablein, a longtime organizer in English and Performance Studies. “I’m most proud of the collective courage and perseverance of my fellow coworkers and can’t wait for the next steps.”
UChicago has a long history as a domestic hub and international exporter of right-wing, conservative ideology. The University’s aggressive 2016–2020 anti-union campaign, during which they refused to bargain with GSU after the union won a NLRB in election in October 2017, became the blueprint for peer institutions to proliferate legal arguments denying that student employees are workers. This model has been recently used by other universities like Duke with its drawn out attempt to throw out SEIU’s petition, and with MIT, who has maintained a strategy to cynically differentiate “fellows'' from their coworkers. Up against this leader of anti-union efforts across higher education, graduate workers at UChicago have secured a contract that enshrines major improvements to compensation and benefits, setting a blueprint for grad workers across the Midwest and beyond.
Contract Wins
GSU-UE’s contract establishes a minimum Ph.D. stipend floor of $45,000, reflecting a 22 percent raise for graduate workers at the current minimum stipend level of $37,000. After campaigning for almost a year and uniting membership behind a $45K minimum stipend, members successfully won their topline issue. UChicago will now have one of the top five best funding packages in the country when adjusted to local cost of living. Anna Conner, an organizer in History, said, "As a graduate student who helps to support a parent, the stipend increase will make a really meaningful difference not only to me, but to my family."
This contract also features multiple new benefits for its membership, including dental, vision, and transit stipends, plus lump-sum visa payments for all incoming international workers. Moreover, our win on retirement contributions is the first of its kind in graduate union contracts at private universities in the U.S. Importantly, these yearly individual benefits are not earmarked in a specific way, allowing workers the flexibility to prioritize their personal needs. Additionally, incoming international PhD students will now receive $510 to reimburse the costs of visas and related fees. “International students make up a significant proportion of workers on campus, and this contract is the first time international students will be able to receive some real protections and support from the University,” said Soham Sinha, a bargaining committee member in Public Health.
Alongside these robust raises and benefits, the contract also enshrines workplace power. The University ultimately conceded on one of GSU-UE’s main priorities: a fair grievance procedure to address both discrimination and abuse of authority. Graduate workers at UChicago will now be able to go through the union’s grievance procedure when they experience discrimination, harassment, or workplace abuse. This contract ensures for its graduate workers critical rights and protections that will profoundly change the conditions of being a graduate employee –– on the individual level and as a union of thousands of people.
Another huge victory is a strong union security provision. GSU-UE organized an aggressive campaign on this front by casting the University as a champion of conservative Right to Work politics. We pushed them to back off their “open shop” position, successfully securing universal dues or agency fee enforcement before economic proposals even hit the bargaining table. This will ensure that UE Local 1103 has ample resources to protect and support future graduate workers, while also building on the gains of this contract in future fights for graduate worker rights and power.
What makes this contract so special to our members is that it dismantled the horrible teaching structure that the University designed to kill the 2017 graduate worker unionization effort. In fact, the contract’s teaching article is the only one of its kind in the country. In addition to contractually establishing the number of teaching assignments required to receive one’s stipend throughout the duration of their program, it also ensures that graduate students are paid for every extra assignment they take. Furthermore, it chips away at the University’s longstanding experiment with abusing temporary graduate labor. In recent years, the University restricted PhDs from taking additional teaching jobs while massively expanding one and two-year Master’s (MA) programs. This created a high-turnover pool of workers who received no benefits and lower pay for doing similar jobs. One of the final sticking points in bargaining was the elimination of student fees for MA teaching assistants and raising the hourly wage for MA research assistants. Our wall-to-wall union of Ph.D. and MA workers has made tremendous progress eliminating tiered work, which makes the union more secure while honoring the value of all graduate student work.
Renée Fonseca, a graduate worker in Human Genetics and GSU bargaining committee member, said, “We're so excited to have a contract that will truly improve the lives of grad workers across campus, and we're so proud to be able to use this language and our collective power to keep fighting for fair working conditions for all our members.”
Campaign
The contract campaign and this local is built on WORKER-TO-WORKER organizing, relying on our members to run this union. We were an independent, uncertified union for the majority of our history and have won substantial pay raises and benefits throughout that period through militant workplace actions. At every step of our campaign as a UE shop, beginning with the first card campaign, members have enthusiastically participated in petition campaigns, demonstrations, surveys, town halls, walkthroughs, office visits, and general membership meetings. All of this, including the new contract, was made possible through their dedication to improve the working conditions for graduate workers.
Bargaining started last year with management proposing that all graduate workers who teach undergraduates should not be included in the bargaining unit. This “proposal” would have removed a third of our unit. The members, rightfully outraged, started a petition demanding that management drop this silly position –– after all, it is no secret that UChicago relies heavily on graduate student labor to educate its undergraduate population. The petition was signed by 1,500 graduate workers –– the majority of our unit –– in less than two weeks; management folded immediately. After this incident, management realized that they were bargaining with over 3,000 workers, not just a handful of representatives.
We kept up the pressure on UChicago throughout the campaign with issue-based organizing around discipline and discharge standards, union shop and protections from harassment, and discrimination and abuse of authority. We won a discipline and discharge article and a full agency shop before we even started bargaining on economic demands.
In the final stages of negotiations, while trying to settle economic demands and protections from harassment, we released our strike pledge at a general membership meeting in February which was attended by over 500 people. We received 1,000 pledges in just four hours, and reached a majority of the membership in less than two weeks. Right before the tentative agreement was reached, nearly 2,000 graduate workers had pledged to strike during the spring quarter. In the end, membership voted 97 percent in favor of ratifying the contract.
Next steps
Now that we have secured our first contract, the members are committed to building a strong local. Our next steps are to elect a constitution committee and begin drafting our constitution. We are also in the process of establishing a robust network of union stewards to make sure the wins of our contract are enforced. Looking forward, we hope to establish a strong foundation for future contract negotiations for our local, and for other unions organizing on UChicago’s campus. “Now comes the truly exciting part, using this contract to change the shape of graduate student labor from the classroom to the lab,” said Stablein. This contract is not just about our immediate gains, but about leaving a legacy for all future UChicago graduate workers to be proud of.
The Local 1103 (GSU-UE) negotiating committee consisted of Evan Yamaguchi, Micah Gay, Chris Wilson, Matthew Bousquet, Valay Agarawal, Henry Ando, Anna Lorimer, Renee Fonseca, Soham Sinha, Nicholas Elliott, Maniza Ahmed, Elaine Colligan, Joseph Rathke, Rachel King, Karen Wu, Fabien Maltais-Bayda, Misha McDaniel, Andy Archer and Morgan Kincade. Former members are Ben Ketter, David Zegeye, Rina Sugarawa, Jordan Enos, Dina Rosin and Maia Clare. They were assisted by UE Staff Coordinator Kim Lawson and UE Project Organizers Andrew Seber, Wolfgang Boehm and Steven Redford.