The Golden Age of Academic Unionization

 

USC’s graduate students are only the latest to join a surge of union organizing at colleges across the country. Since the start of 2022, nearly 35,700 students have gained union representation across 30 new collective-bargaining units. What’s more, the USC agreement follows a pattern of recent negotiation victories begun last year with the landmark contract won by graduate students and other academic workers at the University of California, ending a high-profile strike across its 10 campuses. Throughout, the support for unionization has been overwhelming: “On average, 91 percent of eligible student workers voted in favor of unionization in representation elections in 2022–2023,” according to the most recent “State of the Unions” report from the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. So too has support risen for strike authorization: Almost one-third of all the higher-education-worker strikes in the past decade took place between January 2022 and June 2023. Half of those occurred in just the first six months of this year. Read more from the chronicle of Higher Education here.