Graduate Students at Williams & Mary Are Building a Union, and All Workers Are Invited

by Shane Burley

There is a massive crisis taking place for college students across the country, and Jasper Conner knows it all too well. As a history graduate student at the College of William & Mary, a public university in Virginia and one of the oldest legacy schools in the country, Conner was saddled with $25,000 in student debt as he walked into his program. Now, he is raising two children on the $24,000 stipend he makes providing educational services, like supporting tenured faculty as a teaching assistant.

Graduate student Jasper Conner is trying to raise a family on four right now, relying on food stamps and other government programs to get by while his daughter is still too young to go into preschool.

Across the country, a massive wave of graduate student workers, who are often employed by the universities where they study, are organizing with labor unions. It is not uncommon for graduate students to get tuition remuneration along with a stipend to cover the work they do for their departments, which is an essential piece of the educational, research, and resource infrastructure for both students and faculty. Since they occupy two roles—that of both student and employee—unionization drives can confront the dynamics for both.

Graduate student unions, drawing on the campus culture of protest, have helped to drive (and have been driven by) the recent surge of union militancy.  At William & Mary, when an early organizing committee of graduate students met last year, they realized that they needed to expand their vision of unionization to include all the employees on campus: not only faculty but also the classified staff that do everything from maintenance to food service. This model is traditionally called “industrial unionism,” where all employees at a workplace are invited into the same union rather than being divided up by trade or classification.

“We discussed the issue and realized that we didn't want to improve our own lives without working to improve the lives of the rest of the people who are essential to the functioning of our university,” Conner told me. “We realized there was inherent power in bringing as many university workers together as possible to utilize all our our collective power. We know that graduate workers and facilities management workers have historically been divided on our campus, and on many campuses throughout the country. Neither of us gain anything from this division and we have a lot to win by uniting together.”

Back to Basics

Following their commitment to industrial unionism, the newly formed William & Mary Workers’ Union (WMWU) decided to organize along with the Virginia Public Services Workers, a part of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) who represents 35,000 workers across the country in sectors ranging from manufacturing to education. UE prides itself on being a “rank-and-file” union with aggressively democratic leadership structures, founded on ground-up principles that focus on organizing within workplaces rather than on external factors like politics—it was one of the few unions to break with the political consensus of the AFL-CIO by endorsing Bernie Sanders in 2016.

What is more, UE has staked its organizing identity on fighting back in areas where public sector collective bargaining is under attack. Public sector workers in Virginia, which would include educational staff at state-funded colleges, are barred from collective bargaining over wages and benefits. This means that one of the standards of a union workplace, the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) that dictates everything from wages to working conditions, is prohibited, and there are a number of other hurdles to union security. For a union to be successful at this type of workplace it is going to require rank-and-file unionism, which favors direct action and organizing over conventional contract enforcement and arbitration, and UE’s mission lines up perfectly.

(In August, at their 76th convention, UE delegates passed a resolution to openly confront eroding bargaining rights, particularly in the South, where right-to-work laws are more prevalent.)

Right now the organizing committee at William & Mary is composed primarily of graduate student workers, but they believe their ability to be successful is bound to their capacity to win density across the state. To that end, the union has begun taking public action on campus: marching on the dean's office on Monday morning and holding a rally at noon on Friday, November 1st.

“The William & Mary Workers' Union would like to invite the workers on campuses throughout Virginia to join with us," Conner said. "We're stronger when we organize all workers together at William & Mary, but we'll be even stronger if we spread the union throughout the public universities of Virginia."

"Higher education is being destroyed by the casualization of teaching and the neglect of the very people who make our commonwealth's university system one of the best in the country," he added.

Neoliberal Campus Life

In Virginia and elsewhere, universities are increasingly run on low-wage, precarious work. Department budgets shrink to pay for the bloated salaries of administrators, while adjunct faculty take on ever-greater work loads. For graduate students, this has meant that while they are expected to deliver professional quality work and maintain academic excellence, they are dealing with the conditions of a workplace that is increasingly slashing budgets and staff supports.

“It is difficult to meet the demands of a PhD program while facing financial precarity. In Anthropology, this has been compounded by erratic and/or missed paychecks and poor communication.... This has caused us immense financial and personal stress,” says a graduate employee in the anthropology department, who asked to remain anonymous. “We are hoping to improve our treatment as workers. In particular, we would like to ensure that our pay is regular and be provided with healthcare as part of our funding package, as students in other departments are.”

The unionization effort has now become a way of dealing with workplace issues that might otherwise be treated as separate with a unified strategy. 

“Not many people in the sciences have ever really had any experience with unions, and many of the people I’ve been talking to are hesitant or skeptical of unions right off the bat,” says Bob Galvin, a graduate student worker in the biology department. “If more people get informed about unions, if a whole group of people who never had any desire to be a part of a union are instead advocates of unions in their own lives, that can be a real vector for the types of changes that will benefit our society as a whole. Making the school a better place in the future for graduate workers in tangible ways is also really exciting.”

Whether or not the union can start to address some of these issues will depend on their ability to grow and expand, which is why they have decided to “go public,” to publicly announce the formation of their union and the beginning of an open campaign to unionize workers. Many organizing committees choose to stay private about their work during the initial phases, which can reduce the chance of counter-organizing or retaliation from their employer. Once they hit a point of functionality they move “above ground,” letting other workers know they exist so they have the ability to expand and grow their numbers. Now that the organizing workers have developed a platform of key demands they want to make on the university, they are able to start confronting the leadership about addressing overdue changes to the campus.

“We are demanding that the university pay for health, dental, and vision insurance for all graduate workers,” said Conner, noting that only academic employees in the science department are allowed health coverage. They are also asking for what they define as a living wage ($28,000 a year), as well as subsidized parking, free printing, and comprehensive representation in how the university solves serious campus problems. They are now ready to present these demands to the Dean of Graduate Students and other university leaders.

“If they refuse to listen to us, we intend to get louder. If they refuse to negotiate with us, we intend to make it difficult not to," Conner said. "Every workplace has an ongoing struggle over who controls what part of the job. By forming a union and organizing our power together, we intend to have a collective impact on that struggle.” 

This campaign presents an intriguing solution to public employees in these restrictive areas, something that UE is committed to. If conservative legislatures are going to push anti-union legislations, then it may result in unions returning to the basics of organizing. Collective Bargaining Agreements and other union security measures were always concessions the unions made during the creation of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which was trying to establish labor peace in the era of mass strikes. If those measures are taken away, then the unions may revive workplace militancy, basing their organizing strategy on constant agitation, expansion, and direct action. And as we have seen over recent years, the restrictive nature of these laws is doing nothing to stop workplace organizing from exploding out of increasingly precarious employment situations.

Public sector workers in right-to-work states have been led to believe that it's illegal for them to unionize. “I was raised in Virginia and I heard that my entire life. UE is a union that knows this isn't true, and has an understanding of how to organize in states with restrictive laws like this," Conner told me. "Workers acting together is a union, whether the university recognizes us or not." 

Shane Burley is an independent freelance journalist and author of Fascism Today, published by AK Press. You can follow him on Twitter and support his work here.