Militant Grad Workers Build Union Power to Fight Attacks on Education and Labor

[milestogo]

By Derek Seidman , Truthout
Published June 3, 2025

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.

Read more: https://truthout.org/articles/militant-grad-workers-build-union-power-to-fight-attacks-on-education-and-labor/

[Justice Brandeis]

1. There are many graduate students who would be open to unionization

But only if the emphasis is upon bread and butter issues and collective bargaining over pay and benefits. There is a good case to be made for graduate student TA's and instructors to stand up for their interests against universities that pinch pennies on the back of Ph.D. candidates.

But plenty of graduate students also support Israel's right to defend itself and have little interest in pronouns, land acknowledgements and forcing people to say "pregnant people" and "Latinx".