Forming a Student Worker’s Union: A Guide

Graduate & undergraduate workers are organizing like never before. Here’s how to join the on-campus labor movement.

UC Berkeley students standing in solidarity with striking employees. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Recently, I received this question from a student worker in my Tumblr inbox:

As a former graduate worker who was expected to put in 20 hour per week shifts (in a setting where hours were actually not tracked at all, and so my demand routinely exceeded that) in return for a paltry stipend of $14,000 per year, I knew I had to put together some resources to help this student worker out.

I remember what it was like trying to negotiate healthy work-life boundaries with the two professors who assigned me work each week. As far as I can tell, my two bosses did not communicate with one another about the workloads they were giving me, so it was impossible for either of them to know when I hit my twenty-hour workload limit every week. If I had officially hit that limit, I’m not sure either one would have chosen to be easier on me anyway.

There was no overtime pay, no disability pay or maternity leave, no formalized method of logging sick days, no HR representative assigned to me, and since both of the professors I worked for taught classes I attended and served on my dissertation committee, I never had the freedom to challenge them on anything. They held the keys to my future entirely in their hands.

Instead of standing up for myself, I kept my nose to the grindstone, stole work hours from my evenings and weekends, scrambled around to keep my calendar of lab meetings and data collection sessions manageable, and somehow also made the time to complete classes and my own research. By the end of the ordeal I was miserably sick, with severe anemia, a heart murmur, and a fever that lasted nine months.

I worked long hours for little pay for five years — teaching classes, grading exams, collecting data, writing it up, helping bring in over two hundred thousand dollars in grant money, and even getting original research published as a first author. But in the eyes of my university, I was…