I signed my first union card my first week of graduate school. It was August 2013, and I was about to start the PhD program in history at Yale. When I joined the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) (now Local 33–UNITE HERE), graduate workers had been organizing at Yale for nearly three decades. Over that time, we won real improvements in working conditions for graduate students because of funding, solidarity, and support from the other unions on campus, who believed in us even when we didn’t believe in ourselves.
Yale was not alone. Unions have invested over the last several decades in graduate worker organizing across higher education, first at public universities and more recently at private institutions like Yale — even though federal law until 2016 said that private-sector graduate workers weren’t really workers. With that support, graduate workers launched a tidal wave of organizing. And despite a roller coaster of ups and downs in our legal ability to organize, Yale graduate workers won their first contract in 2023, a contract that made graduate work livable.
Higher education has been under attack for decades, as states have cut funding and universities have turned into crushingly expensive credential factories. More recent conservative attacks on higher education have intensified existing problems — but this was already an existential crisis. What that crisis looks like for academics is a fifty-year shift away from secure tenure-track jobs (with protections for academic freedom) and toward tenuous gig-style adjunct labor, particularly though not only at ill-funded public institutions.
Most people who start PhD programs will not get tenure-track jobs. Instead, after six or seven years with bad health care, nonexistent childcare, and a limited ability to save money, they’ll transition into an even more precarious existence — short-term research fellowships, teaching single intro-level classes at multiple…
Auteur: Camille Cole
