"Strike at the University of California" by Alex Chis, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
This article was originally published by Truthout.
A shining light within the U.S. labor movement over the past several years has been the rising wave of unionization and militancy among graduate workers, whose labor helps prop up the entire system of U.S. higher education. Tens of thousands of graduate workers have unionized over the past half-decade at institutions like Stanford, UChicago, MIT, Duke, Minnesota, and many more. According to one study, as of January 2024, around 38 percent of graduate student employees were represented by unions, with over 150,000 graduate workers across 81 units.
Grad workers across the U.S. have also engaged in militant protests and strikes not just over recognition and contract fights, but also to oppose attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement. Many graduate unions see their mission as not merely to secure gains around bread-and-butter issues, but to fight for social justice and to defend liberatory values of higher education in the face of the neoliberalization and militarization of universities.
At the same time, graduate workers are facing intensified challenges under a Trump administration that is attacking higher education, cutting federal funding, looking to gut the National Labor Relations Board and intensifying attacks against immigrants and Palestine solidarity activists. While campus repression isn’t new, with precedents under the Biden administration, there are clear signs that attacks are escalating. And university administration efforts to undermine grad unions long predate Trump.
What’s behind the rise of graduate worker militancy? How should we understand this moment in the graduate worker movement? How should graduate workers respond to attacks? Truthout spoke with representatives from three graduate worker unions to discuss these questions.
Jess Fournier is a Ph.D. candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an organizer with UAW 4811, which represents 48,000 workers across the University of California system. Janvi Madhani is a Ph.D. candidate and graduate worker in physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and the national liaison and political action coordinator of TRU-UE 197, which won union recognition in 2023. Shreya (last name withheld by request to avoid retaliation) is a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan and an organizer and steward with GEO 3550, one of the first graduate unions to form in the U.S. back in the early 1970s.
Derek Seidman: How do you understand the rise of graduate worker unionization and militancy over the past several years?
Shreya (UMichigan): The conditions that grad workers face today necessitate militancy and power. Our universities are getting so neoliberalized, and this has put grad workers in increasingly precarious conditions. There’s a selling out of our universities to major donors and a decline in the liberatory values of higher education.
Grad workers face a lot of the same attacks that students face, but we also face attacks as workers. Grad workers across the country also talk to each other a lot. I talk to comrades at other universities every single week. We’ve gotten better at networking and sharing our struggles.
Jess Fournier (UC Santa Cruz): I think it reflects a general trend in labor militancy in the U.S., like with campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon. COVID-19 also really impacted people’s lives and working conditions. The cost of living, especially rent, has also been a big driver of unionization and militancy. It’s just so unsustainable. You’re not paid enough to live where you work.
Another reason is the cross-pollination among grad workers during the last five years. Folks at Santa Cruz, University of Michigan, Dartmouth, Boston University, CUNY, Princeton — we’re all in touch with each other and learning from each other’s experiences.
Janvi Madhani (Johns Hopkins): A large part of the growth of this militancy stems from the recognition that U.S. universities act as profit-maximizing hedge funds and outposts of U.S. imperialism. They develop war-profiteering technologies and research and they’re financially entangled with an international system that seeks to maintain U.S. imperial interests.
Within this context, our research as graduate students is responsible for producing the science, technology and intellectual theories that end up influencing these global systems. We’re struggling not only against the exploitation of our own labor but also against the exploitation of our research to support and even justify policing, militarization and genocide.
What are the biggest challenges the grad worker movement is facing now?
Fournier: Even before Trump, universities were planning austerity programs and trying to winnow away the number of unionized workers. The Trump administration will exacerbate this. Administrators are trying to break the back of organized workers and offload the teaching functions to the most precarious workers who have the least protections. They’re increasing reliance on AI, even as it degrades the quality of education, as a way to automate grading work now done by academic workers who can potentially strike.
We’re learning how to organize more effectively, but the employer is also learning. There was tremendous repression across the country against Palestine solidarity encampments. At Santa Cruz, the intense repression we saw against our 2024 strike was radically different from our strike in 2022. It was sort of a bellwether. All the different attacks happening now are tied together. Our universities are not standing up for workers, and in cases like Columbia, really capitulating.
Shreya: There aren’t any fights the grad worker movement is facing now that we haven’t always been facing. There are new manifestations of issues that began far before the Trump administration. Following our 2023 strike, UMichigan has been implementing austerity measures in retaliation for our militancy and has increasingly been using AI to replace grad labor.
The Regents and the university laid the foundation for the Trump administration by criminalizing pro-Palestinian activism through an aggressive campaign of repression. The crackdown against student immigrants is a broadening of the repression of pro-Palestine activists. The university has done very little to respond to the federal funding cuts or attacks on immigrants. They’ve just thrown their hands up and say they can’t do anything, which isn’t true. It’s an excuse to not do anything.
Madhani: Universities are also not helpless in fighting back against the federal government. When we make demands to divest from Israel or fund grad workers, these are material demands we know they can fulfill. To protect their endowments, these institutions are allowing extrajudicial kidnappings of their own students and meeting ridiculous demands posed by the federal government. They’re cowering and capitulating, even when they have the resources to fight back.
At Hopkins, they’re increasing budgets for policing and surveillance, but then saying they don’t have money to support funding. It’s truly just a crisis of priorities, not a lack of financial wealth or institutional resources. One of the biggest challenges grad workers are facing is restructuring the entire purpose of universities.
How should grad worker unions respond to this moment?
"UPenn Grad students demand" by Joe Piette, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Fournier: The labor movement needs to have a loud, full-throated, no-capitulation response. Many universities are saying, ‘Let’s keep quiet,’ but unions need to do the exact opposite. We need a vision that encompasses all different types of workers at the university. The grad worker movement is well positioned to build a broader coalition among higher ed workers — lecturers, adjuncts, food service, janitorial, administrative staff — which could have a wall-to-wall orientation within common demands. We need that level of organization.
International workers on university campuses are really scared. We recently had a campus Know Your Rights training and we’re working on getting Know Your Rights trainings in every department. Grad unions need to make the kinds of demands of our employer that will protect everyone. The building trades have been very supportive of Kilmar Abrego García. That’s what we all need to be doing.
We need to be showing how these issues are all connected. This is a moment where organized labor can actually intervene to defend people but also articulate a different vision. We should think about what our leverage actually is and build our capacity to strike over these demands on employers.
Madhani: Our responsibility is not just to other grad workers, but also to the larger Hopkins community. We’ve sent the university a list of demands around things like enforcing a sanctuary campus and an end to campus militarization. We’re demanding the deletion of surveillance records of protesters and of incriminating data that the university could hand over to the federal government.
Hopkins has done a really incredible job at student repression. The fight for Palestinian liberation on campus has been a mask-off moment for many students and workers. Members of our bargaining committee were systematically targeted, identified through surveillance, and denied union representation in disciplinary proceedings for participating in the encampment.
Hopkins also put up AI smart surveillance towers, which had a chilling effect on campus. But instead of demoralizing students, it radicalized people. Our union organized a campaign to take the towers down. We also held an internal vote on making our financial practices as a local compliant with BDS. It passed with 72 percent support despite the administration’s attempts to intimidate us.
We are very aware that this is not just a fight for fair wages, but that as workers at a university like Johns Hopkins, which has been long manufacturing the methods and tools to suppress popular movements both on campus and globally, we have a responsibility to use our leverage in a socially responsible way.
Shreya: We’re intentionally focusing our attention on our workplace. We recognize that the university could act right now. The University of Michigan has a lot of power and a massive endowment. We’ve been thinking about how to pressure the university to act.
That leads me back to militancy, meaning a really principled and steadfast response to the situation rooted in careful deliberation among grad workers. We’ve been holding many department meetings where we talk together about what’s happening, formulate demands for the university, and discuss how to win those demands.
What are the most important lessons you’d share with other grad workers?
Fournier: For us at UCSC, it’s been important to have a cohesive, militant form of organization at the department level. Those are the people you work with every day. If you actually want to be able to strike strong and strike long, you need that level of organization with your direct coworkers.
Collective decision-making structures are really important. We need to encourage people to take ownership of the direction of their union. You need a culture of people deliberating together. The locus of where you actually have power is in building with your direct coworkers in your workplace. That’s the biggest lesson that I’ve learned — create those spaces for people to connect with their direct coworkers and institute a culture of people making decisions together.
We’re also really focused on building up our network of stewards, not as a representative position, but as people who regularly check in with everyone in their department or lab. It’s this middle layer of organization that keeps people engaged.
Shreya: Building and sustaining a powerful graduate worker union has to be rooted in bottom-up, worker-to-worker organizing in our workplaces. This means forming organizing committees within your department or lab, talking with your coworkers to process your situation together and cohering around clear demands.
It’s not easy. It requires a lot of patience and capacity for collective reflection and strategic thinking about how the boss is trying to disorganize us and how to respond. All of that is really hard, which is why I emphasize talking to your coworkers. Any moment that I’ve felt confused or hopeless, talking to my coworkers has always helped. A strong grad worker union is rooted in relationships.
Many grad workers are isolated and overworked, so it’s important to build communication and social infrastructure. You could just literally walk around your office and talk to your coworkers. I do that all the time. You could set up a group chat or organize a casual lunch. That’s a great starting point.
Photo by George Pak from Pexels
Some departments are stronger than others, and you can leverage that. If you’re struggling, start with one or two departments with widely felt demands or strong social networks. If those departments can become organized, they can become models for other departments to get organized.
Madhani: This model of organizing by department with your most proximal coworkers has worked really well for us. That infrastructure has carried us through contract enforcement and now in this more escalatory current phase.
It’s our job as worker leaders to militantly organize our peers and steer our movements in the direction of collective liberation. That means taking on radical fights that go beyond bread-and-butter issues, maintaining strong member-led unionism, and not replicating the power imbalances that made us unionize in the first place. I’m personally really proud of how we brought a radical fight for abolition to the bargaining table despite fears that police abolition is not typically understood as a union issue.
We’ve also learned a lot from other grad locals. I still remember some of the initial conversations we had with our UE siblings. MIT has been a pioneer in the new wave of higher education organizing, and they passed on really helpful guidance. Michigan helped us formulate our BDS fight. The UCs talked to us about building strike power. It’s a very large collective project of grad labor.
Finally, what keeps you inspired and hopeful?
Madhani: I see grad workers really embracing radical change, not just incremental reforms. People desire a better world and know the current failings of our systems. There’s a real understanding of what’s at stake that’s driving our movement right now. Even those who aren’t facing immediate risk understand the urgency of collective organizing that goes beyond any one person’s individual interests and is rooted on the basis of fighting for each other. I think that’s a really beautiful form of collective power.
Shreya: What really keeps me excited is just the experience of solidarity between grad workers. Going to our rally defending international grad workers, taking action together, was very energizing for me. We’ve had small wins at the department level, such as departments agreeing to have regular town halls about immigration or funding issues. These are small victories, but they show that we can force change. We’re so powerful together. Moments like this, where there’s so much fear and chaos, can be really disorganizing, which is exactly what the boss wants. The more I stay grounded in the power we have as workers, the more hopeful I feel.
Fournier: The way my coworkers rise to the occasion under very difficult circumstances inspires me. I’ve seen people do amazing things and make incredible sacrifices of their time and energy. I’ve seen people take risks. Our statewide Spring 2024 strike wasn’t for material demands for ourselves, but because our coworkers have been targeted for defending Palestine. Seeing that kind of sacrifice and people’s willingness to keep fighting makes me believe we’re going to win. It’s going to be hard, but I think of the Mike Davis quote: “Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely.” I see people doing that every day, fighting and caring for one another, and that is a really beautiful thing.
Note: These interviews were conducted separately and subsequently edited into a roundtable format.
