[Rose Werth]: I’m really excited about the election win. It’s like a huge moment for me personally. But I’m also just really excited for the kind of bargaining process to come and to be able to say really tangibly the things that are gonna improve in graduate students’ lives because of the union.
COLUMBIA, THE UC SCHOOLS, MIT, AND MORE. NORTHWESTERN IS THE LATEST IN A LONG LIST OF UNIVERSITIES RECENTLY IN THE NEWS FOR THEIR GRADUATE WORKER UNION. AT NORTHWESTERN, GRAD WORKERS VOTED TO UNIONIZE ON THURSDAY AFTER SIX YEARS OF ORGANIZING. 21% OF WORKERS VOTED, OF WHICH 93% VOTED FOR THE UNION. THAT’S OVER 1600 GRAD WORKERS DECLARING THAT THEY WANT FORMAL REPRESENTATION TO NEGOTIATE A CONTRACT WITH THE UNIVERSITY.
THE ORGANIZATION N-U GRAD WORKERS, CALLED N-U-G-W, ORGANIZED TO MAKE THIS UNION A REALITY. THEY ARE A NETWORK OF GRAD WORKERS FROM DEPARTMENTS ACROSS THE UNIVERSITY WHO ESTABLISHED THE UNION’S PLATFORM, LED DEMONSTRATIONS ON CAMPUS, AND MORE. AS A RESULT OF THE VOTE, NUGW’S MEMBERS ARE PART OF THE UNITED ELECTRIC, RADIO, AND MACHINE WORKERS OF AMERICA, THE NATIONAL UNION TO WHICH MOST GRADUATE WORKERS IN UNIONS BELONG.
AT THE TOP, ROSE WERTH, FORMER CO-CHAIR OF N-U-G-W AND A CURRENT ORGANIZER IN THE SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT, EXPRESSED HER EXCITEMENT ABOUT NUGW’S RECENT WIN. I SPOKE WITH HER TO LEARN MORE ABOUT NUGW, THE VOTE TO UNIONIZE, AND THE IMPLICATIONS THIS VOTE HAS FOR THE NORTHWESTERN COMMUNITY.
[Paz Baum]: What are the benefits for graduate workers to be in a union?
[RW]: We do a lot of work for the university grading work in laboratories. We help develop curriculums, organized conferences, all manner of things and don’t really have any sort of say or input prior to having a union into our working conditions. You know, there’s always committees and you know, the university when they choose to solicit our input, but there is really no legal grounding or formal way for us to push back when policies aren’t meeting our needs. Like workplace safety policies or arbitration policies, or ways to say like, “Hey, you’re not paying us enough, we can’t pay our rent, we can’t, you know, buy enough food, we can’t buy coats for our children–we have children.” Those types of things. So a union is the actual legal standing to negotiate those things with the university.
[PB] After the union vote, Provost Kathleen Hagerty released a statement saying quote “We look forward to beginning the process of negotiating a collective bargaining agreement that works for both the University and graduate students within the bargaining unit.” How has the university reacted throughout this process of unionization?
[RW]: Before we were legally recognized, negotiating or meeting directly with the university wasn’t something we were able to do. So most of the work to date has involved just having conversations and working face-to-face with other graduate students as we’ve organized towards the election. So I was happy to see that email go out with the university sort of accepting the results of the election and talking about getting to the bargaining table because I think that’s really where we’re hoping to get next.
[PB]: What are some of your goals once you get to the bargaining table?
[RW]: Those five platform points, the kind of competitive pay raises and stipends. And then for me as a social science student, I work in a program where in sociology, our average time to degree is seven years. And I’m only guaranteed five years of funding. So I’m in my fifth year now and like, you know, I was up till 3:00 AM the other weekend, putting in a fellowship application to try and make sure that I have funding for the next two years. Competitive pay, comprehensive healthcare–there are some real gaps in our health insurance coverage as graduate students–professional standards and labs and class classrooms, which has to do with kind of the burden of TAing and the sort of safety issues and overworking issues that can happen in certain laboratories across campus. And then support for international students. And then just, you know, part of this is just having a union on campus, but like being able to have a real say in the policies that affect us, and especially having an arbitration and a grievance system for when the worst happens, which we hope doesn’t happen.
[RW]: And I think as we move towards bargaining, we’re gonna be able to talk, get more data from graduate students, have more conversations, and get really specific about the specific things we wanna see in a contract.
[PB]: It sounds like there’s obviously a lot of changes in store for grad workers, but how will life at Northwestern change for undergrad students, faculty, and administrators now that grad workers are unionized?
[RW]: My hope is that a rising tide will lift all boats because, you know, we as graduate workers play a really–you know, calling us workers is acknowledging the important role that we play on campus. You know, for undergraduates if we’re not just your TAs, we’re your teachers, we’re the ones, you know, sort of initiating you into like laboratory work.
[RW]: With, you know, faculty I’m sure there are plenty of departments as, like I said, especially in the social sciences, that would love not to have to work really, really hard to try and make sure that their upper year students have funding. And you know, for undergraduates, our working conditions as teachers and as TAs and as sometimes laboratory managers are undergraduates’ learning conditions. So if we are able to create a better environment in the classroom, then that should hopefully spill over and just make Northwestern a more equitable place for everyone.
[PB]: And lastly, what comes next for NUGW now that the union vote succeeded?
[RW]: In a lot of ways, the work of the union starts right now. There’s so much work that went into getting us to a union election, but the kind of grassroots organizing, which is what got us to the huge margin of victory that we had on election day, should just continue. So, you know, having organizers in every department, fostering leaders in every department to be able to talk to their coworkers about what’s going on and what’s happening, and that’s like practical organizing, but it’s also just a focus on community building and doing all of this by being in relationship with one another.
ACCORDING TO ROSE, THE UNION HOPES TO USE THEIR NEWFOUND BARGAINING POWER TO IMPROVE CONDITIONS FOR GRAD WORKERS IF NOT BEFORE THE END OF THIS ACADEMIC YEAR, DEFINITELY BY THE END OF 2023.
FOR WNUR NEWS IN EVANSTON, I’M PAZ BAUM.Music credit: Music by AudioCoffee from Pixabay
