Yale graduate teachers, researchers organize union vote

Graduate teachers, researchers, mentors and others at Yale University will vote to have their union recognized.

Voting will occur in person on Nov. 30 and Dec. 1. Some mail-in ballots will also be cast by eligible workers. Ballots will be counted on Jan. 9.

If elected, the union will be the second-largest graduate worker union in the country, behind MIT.

Late last month, roughly 3,000 graduate students signed union cards with the National Labor Relations Board in a petition to have their union, Local 33-Unite HERE!, recognized.

The filing was the latest development in 30 years of grad student union organizing at Yale. In a statement on Oct. 28, Yale Provost Scott Strobel said Yale would honor the filing for an election. He encouraged graduate workers to “vote their conscience.”

“It’s a really exciting moment, not only for our campaign, but also in the history of grad organizing at Yale,” said Abigail Fields, a a graduate educator in the French department and union organizer.

“There’s been a wave of graduate worker unionization over the past few years. Grad workers at our peer institutions, Harvard and Colombia, won contracts last year.”

The news comes at a time of historic activity within the graduate student labor movement. Graduate workers and postdoctoral students across the country are unionizing at record rates.

Between 2012 and 2019, the number of unionized graduate workers increased from around 63,000 to 83,000. Roughly 50,000 graduate workers, researchers, postdoctoral students and graders recently went on strike across the entire University of California system for better pay.

Graduate students perform research, teaching, grading and other administrative functions at the university, often at hours that reach those of full-time jobs. This is on top of their normal studies and classes for graduation.

These positions are compensated at rates between $38,000-$40,000 a year on average, though individual compensation may vary.

“Graduate workers work and our contributions to the university are absolutely essential for the university’s functioning,” said Fields, “both for its research and educational missions.”

Fields teaches a French language class to undergraduates. She spends 40 hours a week or more on the class. Those hours include class time, teaching, grading, class preparation and holding office hours.

“My job description said I was supposed to work 20 hours a week,” said Fields. “But my responsibilities were teaching a class five days a week, doing all the lesson planning, the grading, writing homework, writing quizzes ... Those were hours I wasn’t paid for. I felt lost, like I had to work literally double-time to keep going.”

Sasha Tabachnikova, a graduate researcher and Ph.D. student in immunology, said that she spent most of her time doing research on long COVID and COVID-19 during the pandemic.

Her work has been published in four scientific articles and is part of our growing understanding of the pandemic. But Tabachnikova had difficulty accessing mental health care.

“What pushed me to want a union was what surrounded our health care we had access to,” said Tabachnikova, who started her time at Yale during the pandemic. “It was not an easy time mentally. I tried to get a therapist through our system, and it took eight months to be matched with a therapist.”

Micah English, a teaching fellow in the political science department who strings together several part-time positions on campus, said that for her it was about workplace safety.

“I had a union at my last job, so I was really able to see how having a union can give workers a voice,” she said. “To be frank, I’m the only black woman out of approximately 100 students, and that’s something that’s quite isolating.”

In that environment, English was worried about people in her position being safe at work. At a previous non-union job she had been sexually harassed and felt like she had no recourse.

The push for a graduate student union at Yale began in the 1989, when roughly 250 Yale teaching assistants participated in a grading strike in an unsuccessful bid to compel Yale to recognize the union. Between 2012-2019 graduate students at various departments at Yale filed about ten bids for union recognition.