Graduate school is a critical step in many career paths—especially in STEM fields—and so getting accepted into a graduate program can feel like an immense privilege. Nevertheless, the decision to start a master’s or Ph.D. program is not an easy one. For many, it means signing up to endure years (from two to over eight in some cases) of financial instability and hardship. The “poor grad student” trope is no joke—nationwide, the vast majority (94%) of life sciences departments do not provide a stipend for their graduate students that constitutes a living wage.
A crowdsourced, curated dataset of PhD student stipends in non-biomedical life sciences departments shows the discrepancies between annual minimum guaranteed PhD student salaries and the MIT required annual income before taxes. (Source: Ellis et al., 2024)
The precarious nature of graduate employment creates an environment that often results in poor working conditions, including financial precarity, insufficient benefits, and risk of workplace harassment. These conditions can create significant hurdles to degree completion and subsequent career success.
Data from the University of California Graduate Student Experience Survey shows that approximately a third of graduate students self-report that financial hardship has impeded their success in their graduate programs (Source: Ellis et al., 2024).
High living costs on many University of California campuses mean that graduate workers in the UC system are hit particularly hard by financial instability. This challenge is perhaps most severe at UC Santa Cruz, where graduate students must stretch their modest stipends to survive in one of the country’s most expensive housing markets. The situation reached a breaking point in 2020, when UCSC graduate workers launched an unauthorized "wildcat" strike demanding cost of living adjustments. This action thrust their struggle into national headlines and highlighted a pattern of activism that has characterized UC graduate worker organizing for decades.
Labor organizing in the UC system has only grown stronger in the years since. In 2022, following an extended series of unproductive contract negotiations, 48,000 UC graduate workers, postdoctoral researchers, and academic researchers went on strike in the largest academic labor action in history. I experienced the strike firsthand as a PhD student and department union steward in UCSC’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) Department. To reflect on the movement, I led a recent study, co-authored with more than 40 collaborators (most of whom were EEB graduate students), that documents our experiences during the strike, the challenges faced in our department, and the organizing interventions we found that helped address them.
Many graduate students in the EEB department at UCSC particularly cared about the outcomes of the strike given their potential to improve conditions that we see as barriers to equity within our department. The life sciences fields have long histories of discrimination that persist today. Due to systemic inequity, individuals with excluded identities – which may include those excluded based on race, disability, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and other characteristics – often face additional challenges securing fair pay and treatment in the workplace. Unfair treatment based on excluded identities also intersects with discrimination based on other shifting identities, such as parental or immigration status.
These challenges continue to affect the culture of EEB and other STEM fields today. For example, individuals in ecology with excluded identities are 50% more likely to encounter hostile work environments. Ecologists with multiple excluded identities face the highest risk of harassment and assault. The result is a power imbalance that limits participation and retention of researchers from developing economies and individuals with excluded identities.
Barriers to retention in graduate programs face graduate students in their roles as academic employees. These barriers are exacerbated for students with intersecting excluded identities. Working conditions won by union contract negotiations act as interventions to address these barriers (Source: Ellis et al., 2024).
Many equity discussions in EEB graduate programs focus on departmental diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, such as inclusive mentoring and pedagogy trainings, anti-racist interventions, and initiatives to improve field safety. However, our experience as graduate students shows that working conditions remain a significant barrier to equity and success in our field, and that systematic change to those conditions is necessary to advance equity in graduate programs and subsequently a more diverse future for the field of life sciences.
Many in the UCSC EEB graduate student body strongly supported the strike because of its potential to create institutional change addressing these equity issues. However, despite shared equity goals through the department, graduate workers faced significant challenges in fostering collective support for the movement across career stages.
The strike lasted 40 days, culminating in a contract agreement that included significant gains: raising wages, increasing childcare subsidies, and improving anti-bullying and harassment policies. These wins highlighted the power of collective organizing. However, the gap between the conditions won and those required to fully address worker concerns underscored that movements like these will continue – both at the UC and beyond.
To maximize the efficacy of these movements, it will be important to recognize and address the unique organizing approaches required in academic workplaces. In contrast to traditional “shop floor” organizing contexts, graduate students occupy a dual role as workers and trainees, and the power dynamics between principal investigators and students can complicate organizing efforts. Mentorship and cross-career-stage collaboration are integral components of graduate work. Many academics deeply value the collaborative culture of research, and this can make the interpersonal tensions of a strike particularly difficult to navigate. We found that facilitating open conversations within and across departments about the goals and strategies of a strike can help build collective support and clarify expectations across career stages.
One of the most complex challenges we faced during the movement was how to effectively withhold labor in research-focused roles. This strike was the first in which graduate students who are paid with research funding to complete their own thesis research were unionized alongside those paid to act as instructors and teaching assistants. This raised questions about how to strategically withhold labor in ways that maximized impact while minimizing personal loss—how do you effectively withhold labor from the university when that labor also will produce your dissertation? These decisions required intentional planning between graduate students within departments to delineate what behavior constituted striking in these cases.
Since the UCSC strike in 2022, graduate student unionization efforts have increased significantly: across the country, the number of newly unionized graduate student employees organized from 2021 to 2023 tripled the number organized during the previous 8 years combined. Recognizing the likelihood of future strikes, our goal in writing the study is to share lessons learned from our department with the broader academic community.
The 2022 UC strike marked a historic moment for academic labor, but it also highlighted how far we still have to go. Systemic inequities and poor working conditions remain pervasive in academia. In an evolving academic landscape in which individuals with a greater diversity of backgrounds and needs are entering graduate programs, institutional support for graduate workers must evolve as well—and if institutions don’t make those changes voluntarily, we can expect to see workers continuing to organize to fight for those improved conditions. However, labor organizing in academia presents unique challenges, particularly as unions grow to encompass broader types of workers. We hope that in sharing our experiences moving through the largest strike in academic history, we can aid future movements as they fight to create a more equitable and sustainable future for our field.
