When graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were drafting their first union contract in the summer of 2022, they spent weeks tracking down examples to get a sense of the types of benefits and protections that were possible. “There are some contracts that are easy to locate on unions’ websites, but many of them are harder to find or not available publicly online. So, we had to do a lot of hunting around,” says Sophie Coppieters ‘t Wallant, a Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering at MIT and president of the MIT Graduate Student Union, which ratified its contract in the fall of 2023.
Now, the task will be easier for future unions representing workers in academia. Last week, the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College released a directory compiling data on 902 U.S. higher education unions of graduate students, postdocs, undergraduates, and faculty, including links to 813 ratified contracts. This represents 80% to 90% of contracts that were active between July 2021 and December 2023, the report authors estimate. The center’s previous report, which came out in 2020, linked primarily to faculty contracts, with only about 20 graduate student union and eight postdoc contracts.
Higher education has seen explosive growth in unionization in recent years, especially among graduate students and non–tenure-track faculty, the new report highlights. At the beginning of this year, about 150,000 graduate students, or 38%, were represented by a union, compared with about 64,000 in 2012. It is an increase of 133%, with most of the growth happening since 2021, including at MIT. And each of those unions needs a contract.
“[This directory] would have simplified our process considerably,” says Coppieters ‘t Wallant, who ended up referring to about a dozen ratified contracts when they and others on their bargaining committee were in the early drafting states. “Beyond the ease of research and finding things, it would have been really helpful [to be able to look at more contracts] to understand the … industry standard,” they add.
Such a resource would also have been helpful when the University of California (UC) Graduate Student Researchers Union was drafting articles on disability rights and discrimination in 2020, says Natalie Moncada, a Ph.D. student in molecular, cellular, and integrative physiology at UC Los Angeles who was part of the bargaining team. With a directory, they would have been able to make sure they weren’t missing any relevant articles in other contracts as precedents and examples to build on, Moncada says. “As a scientist, it’s a good thing. Having more data would have been very useful.”
The directory could also help those who are just starting to think about organizing and trying to figure out whether workers at institutions like theirs and in their state or region have unionized, says report co-author Joseph van der Naald, a Ph.D. student in sociology at the City University of New York. “If workers … are not aware of what other unions exist among, let’s say, private liberal arts colleges in the Los Angeles metro area, the directory provides one place where they can get that information.”
In addition to groups that are just starting out, the directory could help bargaining teams that are working on new contracts after the initial agreement expires, which usually happens every several years. “You agonize over even just one word. The language is so important because you’re drafting a legal document and nobody on the bargaining team is an attorney,” says Erin O’Callaghan, an assistant professor of sociology at Colorado State University. As a graduate student, O’Callaghan was part of the bargaining team in 2020 that created a new contract for the University of Illinois Chicago Graduate Employees Organization, which was first recognized in 2004.
Researchers at the National Center plan to continue to study the union data they’ve put together, especially antidiscrimination contract protections and contracts that represent staff such as administrative assistants. The center, which has a mandate to facilitate bargaining between administrations and unions, also hopes to create an interactive website where people can search for academic contracts that are relevant to them, and even search for specific terms such as “disability protections.”
