Throughout the week, more than 1,000 graduate student workers at the University of Pittsburgh made their way to a nondescript ballroom in the O’Hara Student Center to vote on whether to unionize. Supporters sought everything from more transparency on the part of university administration to pay equity, better vacation time and health insurance.
The line outside the ballroom stretched, at times, down the stairs of the center. “People are so excited … I’ve never seen engineers this excited,” said Lauren Wewer, a materials science and engineering Ph.D. student and organizer at Pitt.
On Friday, organizers announced the results: a 1033-28 vote to unionize with the United Steelworkers [USW]. The Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board had not yet confirmed the vote count as of mid-afternoon.
With this win, Pitt grad student workers become the latest employees to undergo a successful union bid at a U.S. higher education institution, continuing an upward trend in the sector’s organizing activity over the last few years. They also join faculty and staff at the university which unionized with the USW in 2021 and September, respectively.
Pat Healy, an information science Ph.D. student at Pitt, said the wide margin of support reflected in the vote, “aligns with how most of the grad union votes [in the country] have gone the last couple of years.”
Healy has been organizing at the university since 2019, which was the last time grad student workers attempted to unionize. Then, the pro-union students lost by fewer than 40 votes. For them, the impact of this year’s vote stretches beyond Pitt’s campus.
“I’m happy for the movement [and] looking forward to some other grad unions popping up, I’m sure inspired by us, because that always happens,” Healy said.
After Thanksgiving, they said organizers will begin setting up for bargaining with Pitt’s administration.
In a statement after the vote count, the university said, “While first contract negotiations can be complex, please know that we will come to the table in good faith and be there to support all graduate students throughout and beyond the process.”
Immediately following the loss in 2019, any efforts to restart conversations about unionizing would meet with “a kind of extreme hesitancy,” Healy said, blaming “a lack of understanding of what a union was.”
This year felt different, Healy said. There are likely a few reasons why.
A wave of change
From 2021 to 2023, nearly 64,000 U.S. grad student workers joined unions. By comparison, only 20,394 students unionized from 2013 through 2020. Today, four in 10 grad student employees belong to labor groups.
This trend was, experts say, driven in part by the pandemic and by the administration change from Donald Trump to Joe Biden in 2021, which ushered in a National Labor Relations Board more amenable to organizers.
Adrienne Eaton, professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, noticed COVID-19-driven layoffs and research funding losses on campus in New Jersey that eventually led to a faculty and grad student strike last year. She describes this time as an “active moment” in American higher ed, with students advocating for change across the board at universities and colleges. And with grad students, there’s another factor at play: “The faltering job market in academia.”
“A high percentage of students no longer [are] confident that they have a future as tenure-track professors, in particular, or potentially as academic faculty at all,” Eaton said. “So, I think it really changes the way that graduate students look at their assistantships that they get.”
As worries about job prospects abound, Eaton said students are more apt to view assistantships as “a job like any other,” fueling desires for benefits that align with their stance. Add in high-profile labor wins at universities like Yale, Stanford and the University of Chicago, and the notion of having a union becomes a little less novel — almost, “infectious in a positive sense,” she said.
The news about unions at other institutions played the “most critical” role in turning the tide at Pitt, according to Healy.
“There are all these folks who, either they have friends who have unionized at other institutions or they showed up at some rally that they saw the grad students were putting on while they were in undergrad,” Healy said.
Students: Inflation is outpacing stipends
When Raya Haghverdi arrived on Pitt’s campus this year to begin her Ph.D. in marketing, she assumed the grad students were already unionized. After finding out they weren’t, she said she knew which way she was going to vote.
She witnessed the grad students at her alma mater, Indiana University, struggle to unionize and grasped its importance, particularly for students below the poverty line.
“As a business student, I do have some privileges. I kind of have, as far as I know, a higher stipend. I don’t need this union but I do believe in equity for every grad student because I don’t think that my work is worth more than anyone else’s,” Haghverdi said after casting a ballot at O’Hara.
Compensation has often come up as a point of dissatisfaction for Pitt’s grad student workers. While not all grad students work, those who do are paid annual stipends ranging from $20,600 to $34,515. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator, a single adult in Pittsburgh needs to make $43,957 to get by.
Some students have said their stipends don’t match up with what they need to survive, especially in the face of inflation. Previously, the university defended its compensation to Public Source by citing the health care and transportation costs it covers for students, which a spokesperson said lowers the cost of living.
Oscar Fawcett, a second-year statistics Ph.D. student and organizer at Pitt, pushed back against that.
“Yeah, we get transportation but … the actual stipends we have for food and rent has not changed and that’s what inflation has been hitting,” he said.
Pitt raised stipends for graduate student workers by 4% last fall, with minimum stipends for graduate student researchers and assistants brought to $10,000 a term.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an overall 2.6% increase in consumer prices during the past year.
Health coverage decision spurs action
The bureau also reported a 3.8% increase in costs for medical care services.
Last August, Pitt announced changes to the health care plan for grad students — though Healy said it was not so much an announcement as “a link in an email.” The changes involved combining the grad and undergrad health plans to “provide the University with greater leverage in negotiating lower rates for all student health plans in the future,” according to an email sent by Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor Joseph McCarthy.
Without advance notice, deductibles were added and co-pays increased, leaving many students upset. McCarthy recognized this in his email, stating he deeply regretted the “significant anxiety and confusion” caused by the university’s actions.
“My offer letter literally said, ‘Come to Pitt, we have great health care.’ Two weeks before class started, they slashed it,” Fawcett said.
The change especially hit students with families, disabled students, transgender students and international students hard, according to Healy and Fawcett.
Three months after the health care changes were announced, graduate student organizers kicked off a card campaign for union representation.
Next up: bargaining
Before the election, Healy already had their sights set on bargaining because that’s when, they said, “we actually win.” They acknowledged there’s a big question mark surrounding the health care issue.
Healy said they and other student organizers have talked to grad students at other universities, including Harvard, who creatively worked around grievances they had with health plan coverage during negotiations. Healy said Pitt grad students just want the old plan back.
“I keep being told by administrators that that is completely impossible, but I also don’t think that there is currently anything meaningfully pushing them to see if it’s possible,” Healy said.
Healy said that even as student attitudes have shifted, so has the administration’s. This time, the vote brought less pushback from the university compared to 2019.
In January, more than 200 students gathered to deliver a letter to Pitt Chancellor Joan Gabel with the results of the card campaign, in the hopes she’d voluntarily recognize the union. She was out of office, so they filed for a representative election to the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board [PLRB] the next day. Gabel said then that she respected the students’ “agency and self-determination,” and looked forward to furthering their “important engagement in the days ahead.”
Student organizers said the university failed to deliver a list of eligible employees to the PLRB for the next seven months.
Eaton said administration at universities “tend to overestimate how hard it’s going to be and what a disaster it’s going to be if the students are organized.” She said it’s not a “completely irrational” standpoint given how contentious campuses have been recently, but her research has shown that grad student worker unions don’t infringe on academic freedom or degrade faculty-student relationships.
Healy said the vote ends years of debate about whether Pitt grad students who work should be treated as employees. “There is no mistake, we are employees, treat this relationship as a workplace — and a good one.”
Maddy Franklin reports on higher ed for Pittsburgh’s Public Source, in partnership with Open Campus, and can be reached at madison@publicsource.org.
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