University of Chicago students are part of a growing movement of graduate students opting to unionize for fair wages, adequate health care and other workers' rights.
For three days this week, University of Chicago graduate students went on strike to demand the school voluntarily recognize their union.
College courses used to be taught almost exclusively by tenure-track and tenured professors, but as universities have cut costs and corporatized, they are relying more and more on adjuncts and graduate students, Cedric de Leon, a professor and director of the Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said.
Gonzáles knows he is a student, but he also thinks he is a worker, and says the two aren’t mutually exclusive. The challenges that he and other students face aren’t that different from those that workers around the country in nonuniversity settings are up against, he believes. Piland and Gonzáles see collective power as the solution to graduate students’ very material problems. Gonzáles also said the university is “infamous for being the crucible for inequality” in its host neighborhood, the Southside of Chicago, and wants to use union power to fight back.
As tenure-track jobs have steadily declined, universities have grown more dependent on part-time labor from adjuncts and graduate students.
But the NLRB rulemaking announcement could shake things up, especially for students at schools that haven’t yet recognized their unions.
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