Duke graduate students will have a month long window to vote on whether or not they want to unionize.
Graduate students at Duke University who hold positions teaching and conducting research for the university will soon be able to vote on whether to form a union with collective bargaining rights….
Doctoral students who work for the university will be mailed ballots on July 24 and they’ll be counted four weeks later on Aug. 22…
I will vote for solidarity even as I intend to be done with dissertating before most plausible improvements could be gained.
Uncle Cosmo
Well of course you will, for the benefit of those who come after you. Like planting a sapling you know you won’t live to see full grown.
(Dang, foist?!?!?!? :^D)
laura
America works best when you say Union YES!
H.E.Wolf
There is power in a union.
https://www.science.org/content/article/postdocs-and-staff-researchers-end-strike-university-washington
davecb
York University (in Toronto, Canada) has had good results from their grad students having their own union. It forces some questions to the surface to be debated that they outhewise would not be aware of. (I was in the staff union)
Anonymous At Work
David,
Ken
I’m seeing a parallel with your explainers of preventive care coverage, where the insurer doesn’t necessarily see any benefit due to customer churn. Likewise current grad students (the ones who will be voting) may not like the idea of paying a couple of years of dues and probably not reaping any great benefit before they leave.
raven
There was a movement like this at the University of Georgia when I was finishing up as well. I thought it was great but the people who needed more were the maintenance, cleaning and dining hall workers. Talk about people who were fucked over.
H.E.Wolf
In my first permanent full-time job, I was part of the janitorial and secretarial union. It was a very logical partnership: lots of cleaning up after others. :)
rikyrah
Go nerds !
Power in unionization :)
BellyCat
Why not pull up the ladder behind you,
ClarenceDavid? //Baud
What do we want?
Pocket protectors!
When do we want it?
Now!
SeattleDem
When med students at a University Medical Center unionized and demanded an end to the worst of the hazing-like abuses, patient outcomes improved. Who knew that treating workers better meant they worked better?
Kelly
The first union I belonged to was a Teamster’s local that represented workers at a vegetable cannery. Summer jobs there paid about double over the than other, minimum wage, summer jobs available to high school me. The outcome of contract negations pissed me off a bit one summer. After talking all us summer workers into supporting a strike vote the contract we ended up with gave year round workers significantly better raises than seasonal. I support the unions anyway. A second class union member was better off than a non-union working teen.
David Anderson
I think the demands are mostly going to be economic for the humanities and social science grad students and working conditions for the bench scientists. I know that my department usually has it pretty good as we as a cohort are mostly treating PhDing as a 40-ish hour a week job.
The bench folks have ridiculous working hours and no ability to have work-life balance.
Eunicecycle
@Kelly: the best summer job my daughter ever had was at a union shop, also Teamsters. It was an ice cream plant and she made double what she would have at any other job, although she did make less than full time workers.
Tom Levenson
MIT grad students won their union election in the last year or so. The first contract negotiations are not going well on two key issues: union dues across the bargaining unit (not just union members) and salary.
I won’t be surprised to see a strike this fall. It will be an interesting time–made more so by the fact that we have a largely new top administration, with our president taking reins only this last term.
Fake Irishman
Solidarity! I was in the bargaining team and ran the comms shop for my grad local (University of Michigan Graduate Employees Organization AFT 3550), one of the two oldest in the country. The first year I was there, 2004-2005 they got gender identity enshrined as a protected class in the contract. Premium-free Health care, tuition waivers, child care subsidies all included in the contracts we bargained. It was amazing to see the history of what went from the admin saying “this is impossible” to “this” becoming a a benefit that UM bragged about providing its grad students with in promotional materials.
(Oddly enough it was all the research I did about health premiums and payments for the union that led me to my current job as a health policy researcher)
Fake Irishman
@David Anderson:
this tracks with what we heard when we tried to organize research assistants at Michigan. (Grad teachers are considered employees, grad research assistants are not in Michigan. The history of that split is the result of about a decade of bad faith legal actions by the university between 1970 and 1985.)
Fake Irishman
@Tom Levenson:
Agency fee is always a huge hill to climb on the first contract.
Yutsano
Solidarność!!! Welcome to the labour movement brothers!
**National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 30
evap
My university was so terrified at the thought of the graduate student teachers unionizing that they made the teaching part of the degree requirements. This did have the effect of drastically cutting down on the amount of teaching that could be required. Previous to this, my department was asking PhD students to teach one course a semester for 4 years. Now they only have to teach 2 courses total after grading and running review sessions their first year.