| Two months ago, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that PhD students who are also teachers at private universities in the US count as employees under federal labour law. This means they are entitled to vote for a union. A change in labour law may not seem very exciting – but the day of the ruling was one of the most thrilling of our lives.
We are graduate teachers at Yale University: Robin is a geologist, Aaron is a political theorist , and Josh is an English literature scholar . We have been campaigning for recognition for our work as graduate teachers for some time.
In fact, graduate students at Yale have been organising for 26 years. Ours is the longest-standing union effort at a private university in the country. Generations of graduate employees before us have fought for and won improvements to our working conditions.
But we still have a long way to go in order to improve our conditions – which is why this ruling, and our chance to unionise, is so crucial. We have colleagues who spend more than half of their teaching salary on childcare. Others have seen their teaching workload double without any increase in their pay. And last year some graduate teachers faced a cut in their pay of nearly 22% for doing the same type of teaching assignment that they did the year before.
Persistent protest
In the past few years, we’ve demonstrated time and time again for our desire to be part of a union. We’ve marched by the hundreds in the pouring rain, and we’ve persistently presented statements on the teaching issues we want to address through the negotiations. Last spring, we officially chartered our union: “UNITE HERE Local 33”.
It’s an extraordinary time for academics who want better terms and conditions
After the NLRB’s ruling, our university can’t ignore us any longer. The ruling means that we finally have the right to elections to win official recognition of the union we’ve chartered.
It’s an historic moment, and an exciting time to be teaching at Yale. It’s also an extraordinary time for the academics who want better terms and conditions beyond New Haven. In the past few years we’ve been joined by a surge of organising efforts at universities across the country. From Harvard, to the University of Chicago, to Columbia, graduate teachers are insisting that our work is crucial to the educational mission of our universities, and should be recognised as such.
After we heard the decision, celebrations erupted. Messages of support and congratulations poured in from around the country: from our peers at public universities who have unions and know how they improve lives; from our colleagues at private universities who, like us, are thrilled to finally have the right to vote; and from former Yale graduate teachers who’ve campaigned for this in the past.
The heart of universities
Graduate teachers take the classes that are at the heart of college education at Yale. The three of us have taught Yale undergraduates to read fossil records, political arguments and poetry, and to see the world differently as a result.
We came to graduate school because learning about these things – the fossilised death spiral of horseshoe crabs, the evolution of democratic thought, the technique of verse composition in early 19th-century poetry – changed our lives. And in turn, we wanted to change the lives of our students through our teaching.
We still want that. But we also want the university to recognise and support the work of teaching. We want to make Yale a better place to teach. And we know that a union is the way to do it.
In the process of organising our union, we have talked to our colleagues and each other about the vision of the university workplace we want, and we have advocated for the things that will bring it about.
We want our female colleagues to have recourse to a grievance process in response to sexual harassment at work. We want to secure the mental health resources necessary for teachers to combat stress.
We want a union so we can campaign for affordable childcare for graduate teachers who are parents that struggle to work and care for their families. We want the chance to hold the university accountable for discrimination in the workplace. We are ready to take steps to make these visions a reality.
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