Are they students or employees? Stanford joins surge in graduate student unions across the country
When Jason Anderson, a fifth-year PhD student, volunteered for a pop-up food pantry on Stanford University’s campus, he saw hundreds of grad students standing in long lines in the middle of their workday, sometimes with a wagon in one hand and a child in the other.
“Once a month, the administration would show up at (graduate student government) meetings and say, ‘We really need extra volunteers.'” “People aren’t showing up,” Anderson, a former student government member, explained. “And then all I’m thinking in the back of my head here is, ‘You know, you’re asking for volunteers from the same population that the food pantry is supposed to serve.'”
One of the many reasons Anderson and other Stanford grad student workers overwhelmingly voted to unionize in July was the affordability crisis.
They are part of a growing movement on college campuses across the country, including the University of Southern California, Johns Hopkins University, MIT, and the University of Chicago. However, convincing the public that the long-perceived starving graduate students are more than just students is part of their challenge in their campaign for labor rights.
“Student organizing across the country is about students actually identifying as workers,” Brenda Muoz, deputy chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, explained.
For more than a half-century, American universities have increasingly relied on contingent faculty or graduate students to conduct research and teach classes, according to William A. Herbert, executive director of Hunter College’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining and Higher Education and the Professions. However, graduate students who do this type of work have “long been squeezed on a variety of matters,” including wages, housing, healthcare, and childcare, according to Stanford law professor and former National Labor Relations Board chair William B. Gould IV.
As a result, unionization efforts have recently increased. According to Herbert, 30 new student bargaining units were certified or recognized in higher education from January 2022 to June 2023, with graduate students accounting for more than half of those bargaining units.
Graduate students are also striking in greater numbers at universities. Last fall, 36,000 UC graduate students and 12,000 other academic workers took part in the largest strike in the history of higher education in the United States. Other universities, including Rutgers and the University of Michigan, went on strike months later. Graduate student activity also coincides with a renewed labor movement in the United States, with strikes affecting Hollywood, city workers in San Jose, teachers in Oakland, and Starbucks locations across the country.
The debate over whether graduate students should be classified as employees or students dates back to the 1960s, with some of the earliest labor movements beginning at UC Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Collective bargaining rights for employees of public universities are determined on a state-by-state basis. These rights are explicitly granted to academic student employees in California. However, the NLRB has discretion over the rights of private university students. Historically, the board has been split on whether graduate students are students or employees, but a 2016 NLRB decision granting Columbia University grad students the right to unionize appeared to signal a shift in thinking. According to Gould, now that the Biden Administration is pro-labor, “the board is really open for business” in allowing graduate students at private universities to officially unionize.
Tanzil Chowdhury, a third-year PhD student in materials science at UC Berkeley, has personally felt the impact of the union. When the Arizona native first began his program, he was earning around $35,000 per year, with rent accounting for 50% of his income, classifying him as severely rent burdened by federal standards. His annual salary will rise to around $47,000 by September as a result of a new contract negotiated following the UC strike last fall.
“That means I don’t have to spend so much of my time worrying about whether I’m going to be able to spend this much on groceries this month, or whether I’m going to be able to go out and have a meal with my friends or with folks in my field so that I can advance my career,” said Chowdhury, a campus union leader. “Having a little more financial security is a huge deal.”
Chowdhury also emphasized how the contract strengthened protections by establishing an independent grievance process for students who face harassment or discrimination at work – and organizers at other universities, such as Stanford, are pushing for similar safeguards.
The Stanford union is preparing to bargain with the university, and talks are expected to begin near the end of the summer. “As long as the administration negotiates in good faith, so will the union,” Anderson, a union organizer, explained.
Stanford spokesperson Luisa Rapport said the university “greatly values” its graduate students and referred the Bay Area News Group to the work of the university’s Affordability Task Force, which includes expanding supplemental need-based support for graduate students and increasing the Graduate Student Family Grant. Rapport also stated that the university is committed to addressing harassment and discrimination and that it has resources to do so.
Wesley Guo, a fourth-year PhD student in mechanical engineering, was inspired to get involved with unionization efforts at Stanford after witnessing students “gather in solidarity with each other” during the UC strike.
However, the inspiration extends beyond academic organization. Em Horst, a sixth-year PhD student and union organizer at Stanford, joined the picket line last year with striking Stanford nurses and felt energized seeing people “shout and bring their kids to the picket line.”
“Seeing other people who work less than a mile from where I work, and seeing people whose lives intersect with mine, use a union as a way to actually advocate for themselves, advocate for the people they care for, and advocate for their community – this inspired me to continue the work of organizing here at Stanford,” Horst said.
