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Eight years after forming and one year after voting to unionize, the Northwestern Graduate Workers have a contract!
73% of NUGW members voted “Yes” on March 13th to a tentative agreement reached by the bargaining committee and the university three weeks earlier. Provisions in the contract include a $1k signing bonus, a $45k base stipend starting in September, 100% of premiums for dental and vision, an international student worker fund, and recourse with a grievance procedure.
Esther Kamm: The provisions that are most exciting to me are all of the protections that can be enforced through a grievance procedure. Before, in many cases whether it’s overwork in lab or a situation of discrimination, people didn’t have a clear pathway to resolve those issues, and if they did have something they were supposed to do, they had to go through it alone. Now that there’s a union contract every issue related to enforcing that contract can be addressed through a grievance and with the support of a peer–a steward–in your department who knows the contract and who’s there to support you.
That’s Esther Kamm.
Kamm: I was a member of the bargaining committee and NUGW co-chair for 23-24.
It was not a smooth road to victory for NUGW.
Kamm: The big hurdles that we had to face were around lines that the university drew and trying to figure out how far can we push them to increase the benefits.
Some of the big hurdles that we encountered were around, for example international workers…there was further probably that Northwestern could have and should have gone. Similarly, for funding for health coverage…we added some great wins like vision and dental coverage at 100%, but Northwestern drew some hard lines around covering the spouses or children of grad workers.
For some grad workers, the provisions in this contract did not go far enough–27% of members to be exact. When the tentative agreement was announced, a group of NUGW members mobilized to run a “Vote No” campaign, highlighting key issues like a lack of dependent healthcare coverage and insufficient funding for international students. If a majority of NUGW members had rejected the contract, the union would have gone on strike.
Vineet Gupta: My name is Vineet Gupta…area of study is sociology…I was an active department organizer.
There are clear concessions we made in this contract that I think most people are in agreement on. And I think the question is whether those concessions are big enough and whether we have the capacity right now to keep fighting for more.
We had concessions: income back pay, international worker funds. It’s just, it’s insufficient. The Title IX arbitration and dependence arbitration, we didn’t win that…Northwestern just completely shut out the accessibility side.
Heather White, a department organizer in mechanical engineering, highlighted the concessions made regarding international students.
Heather White: Northwestern’s argument in the case of international support was, well, international students can be quite wealthy. And, you know, it’s like, no, the international students that get here can be quite wealthy, right?…So I think that’s an important consideration that when we’re not supporting the transition of these international workers to Northwestern, we’re hurting our own diversity.
Marsalis Smith has been studying at Northwestern for 10 years and is about to graduate. He voted “no” on the contract.
Marsalis Smith: The biggest thing for me personally, because I am in rehabilitation, but I think the non-auditing to make sure that the campus is ADA accessible is a huge thing.
Smith wants to ensure that the workers who come after him have a better quality of life at Northwestern than he’s had.
Smith: I think I was making like 32, maybe less when I first got here. Over the past 10 years, if you factor in inflation, I’m sure there hasn’t been any noticeable difference.
I want people who come after me to be able to, you know, get to enjoy being a grad student somewhat. When my friend’s like, “Oh, let’s go out to eat for drinks,” I have to look at my bank account, like, “Maybe not tonight.”
Other union members voted “no” for a more tactical reason.
White: I must have flipped back and forth about six times.
Heather White again.
White: The couple of things that really flipped me over to voting “no” was for one, I’m tired of making decisions out of fear of repercussions in the sense that these are the right decisions to make in terms of what we’re seeking to obtain.
The other thing that was going through my mind was that it’s not just an immediate effect that our decisions make. There are other unions watching how our fight is going to see what they can achieve. There are other universities watching Northwestern to see what they can get away with. So, you know, our movement really has much farther branching effects than just at Northwestern.
Proponents of the new contract argue that raising the bar for other grad worker unions should not be a priority when negotiating the NU contract.
Kamm: We’re not negotiating with an industry. We’re negotiating with an institution.
Despite the “Vote No” campaign, the contract was ultimately approved, but the fight still isn’t over. The university and the union disagree on who is included in the bargaining unit covered by the new contract.
Kamm: The part of the contract that says who’s covered by the contract refers to grad workers performing research and instructional services, and we do have the words including fellows in that article.
However, the university is maintaining that people who are on internal or external fellowships…do not require you to do any research or instructional services for the university.
NUGW is not allowing for these exclusions without a fight, though.
Kamm: We’ve had over 500 grad workers already fill out an NUGW survey about their exclusions and are building campaigns with specific subgroups of those people to pressure the administrators of their departments, the deans of their schools, the provost, etc.
When asked their desires and expectations for the future, all the NUGW members I spoke to all had similar answers:
White: I think it will be really important to focus on building up our strike fund so that we can have the ability to strike and support the people who are living paycheck to paycheck, but still get what we deserve.
Kamm: One important next step that we are going through now is electing a committee to write our new constitution…The 1st element that is common in UE constitutions is to have a grievance committee…that talks about the status of grievances, where grievances are coming up. And to reiterate, grievances are just any violation of the contract.
Gupta: We also need to build solidarity around issues.
The No Vote is like, we’re willing to fight for it. And so, those give me confidence that in the next few years we can really build some coalition around these issues.
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For WNUR News in Evanston, I’m Paz Baum.
