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Good morning!
A flurry of unionization efforts has taken over graduate communities across the country, with graduate students at Harvard, Columbia, Brown, and most recently, Yale, already unionized. Such organizations are formed in collaboration and registered with the National Labor Relations Board, as long as 30 percent of the graduate students at an institution give explicit support by signing a worker card or petition. According to the Science Student Council, an advocacy group, such unions can be a way to “ensure that graduate students’ contributions to the university are respected as real work” and offer “a mechanism to enforce [relevant labor] rights and provide legal recourse for students whose rights are violated.”
Princeton Graduate Students United (PGSU) was formed in 2016 with the stated mission to better graduate students’ compensation, health care coverage, housing, and more. In January of 2022, graduate students received a 25% increase in their graduate student stipend, although PGSU representatives speculated that the threat of organizing motivated the raise. Calls for better wages, including the most recent rally for unionization that took place on Feb. 15, have accelerated graduate students’ labor organizing.
At a Graduate Student Government assembly meeting, union representative and classics graduate student, Aditi Rao addressed questions about the movement, due payment, international student assistance, and more. Although around 1,500 students signed the union card at the Feb. 15 rally —exceeding the registration requirement of 30 percent of the student body and almost reaching 50 percent — Rao appeals for “a supermajority.” “We want to get out number up to as close to 2,000 as possible,” Rao explained, “so we know for ourselves that the vast majority of students at this university support a union.”
The GSG assembly then voted to release a statement in support of PGSU’s efforts.
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Analysis by Hareton Song
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