Indiana University graduate workers help Johns Hopkins, Northwestern unionize this year (2023)

While her peers were entrenched in research, on a shift at their second job, or teaching a class on campus, Indiana University graduate student Zara Anwarzai spent a chilly day in January holed up inside the Dirksen Federal Building in downtown Chicago, listening with bated breath as the National Labor Relations Board staff began a slow, laborious count of 1,758 ballots.

The vote at hand? Whether Northwestern University graduate students would formally unionize, crossing the finish line that their IU peers are still chasing.

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While their fight on the Bloomington campus continues, Anwarzai is among a handful of IU students taking what they learned from the months-long strike to help graduate students across the country unionize.

Working with national labor organization United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), their efforts have contributed to the campaigns at several prominent universities, including Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago and Dartmouth, as part of a nationwide wave of thousands of graduate workers unionizing just this year.

"The more organized grad workers we have at Johns Hopkins or Dartmouth, we hope it's that much easier for graduate workers at another campus to form a union," IU graduate worker Katie Shy said. "The power of all of these campaigns bargaining at the same time means that we can really push the standard in graduate education and, as each union contract is stronger, we know that that lays the groundwork for the next campus."

Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern graduate workers all voted to unionize this year. Why now?

Across the country — at colleges big and small, private and public — thousands of graduate workers have been increasingly signing union cards and turning up in droves at the polls.

To IU graduate worker Sam Smucker, who has some background as a labor union organizer, this is far from a coincidence.

"With the grad workers, it's really because higher education has increasingly, I think, moved to a model where you've got very high-paid administrators sorting resources, in what they consider to be money-making kinds of projects as opposed to bringing money into the classroom. And one of the ways they've attempted to keep these resources is by holding down salaries of employees," Smucker said. "So grad employee salaries have just not kept pace with the cost of living."

Smucker references his own department at IU Media School, where he says in 10 years, there'd only been two raises.

"That's, I think, somewhat typical across the country for what's going on with grad workers," Smucker explained. "There is increasingly, in higher ed, a class system that's developing. You get very high paid administrators who don't come out of the institution that they're administering — they're not professors who raised through the ranks and who really cared about the institution. These are folks who come in for five years and they see their job as to try to reduce costs and then move on (to another university). And the result is that educational programs are diminished while they attempt to put resources into buildings and raising donations."

Smucker describes this moment as "a huge wave" across the nation that is ramping up to be a full-fledged movement of worker rights in the higher education realm. One of the institutions taking part is Northwestern University, where Anwarzai was the direct touchpoint between graduate students and the national labor affiliate, UE.

"It was really exciting and really nerve wracking because I had never led such a big campaign on my own," Anwarzai said, noting Northwestern has around 3,400 graduate workers.

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Though she isn't enrolled at Northwestern, instead going to school at a competing university over 200 miles away, this election was personal to Anwarzai. It was the culmination of many sleepless nights, hours-long commutes and intense campaigning on the Chicago and Evanston campuses.

During the ballot count in January, the "no" votes were totaled first. Anwarzai felt a pins and needles sensation building at the nape of her neck.

"It's pretty intense, where you're just like, 'Oh, my God, like, stop now,'" Anwarzai recalled.

Eventually, it did stop — at 114. Then the "yes" votes were carried in. In boxes. Plural.

"That feeling was honestly one of the most incredible of my life. I was, like, crying at 800 (yes votes)," Anwarzai said. "And then it just kept going and going."

In the end, those no votes were overwhelmed by a 1,644-yes majority. Northwestern graduate students formally unionized, joining the UE and subsequently receiving union recognition from university administration.

Anwarzai took that day to celebrate, followed by two days off to recharge.

"Then I went straight (back) to Chicago for the lead up to (University of Chicago's) election," Anwarzai said.

It was on to the next one. The work, it seemed, was never finished.

From local strike to union elections across the country: How IU grad workers have fed a movement

To proponents of a labor union, a collective bargaining agreement levels the playing field with the employer; employees have more power to negotiate pay, benefits and other employment terms and conditions. Some employers, including the IU administration, pushed back against formal unionization, claiming it places an unnecessary middle man in the employee-employer relationship and isn't appropriate for graduate workers since their work is tied to their education.

In order to pool resources and have access to a pre-existing structure, small, independent labor unions often partner with national labor union organizations such as the UE, whose membership includes "rail crew drivers, hospital workers, co-op workers, federal contract workers, teachers, paraeducators, clerical workers, graduate workers, scientists and librarians," per its website.

The UE, which self-claims to also stand for "union for everyone," was the independent union that 2,000 IU graduate workers, through the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition, partnered with in midst of the Bloomington campus labor dispute last year.

At IU, Smucker saw graduate workers were dealing with the same sort of labor struggles he had fought against 25 years before. Prior to landing at IU as a graduate worker himself, Smucker worked for UE, playing a major role in a graduate worker union campaign at the University of Iowa.

During the months-long strike at IU Bloomington in 2022, Smucker and a few other leading organizers were approached by the UE to help out at other universities, where the graduate worker population was interested in unionizing but did not have the resources or knowledge on how to start.

Lending his skillset, Smucker was the key UE organizer at the University of Chicago, which overwhelmingly voted in favor of unionization just last month.

"At the University of Chicago, when they kicked off their campaign, speakers at their meeting explicitly talked about (IU) and how it was an inspiration to them for going ahead and starting their own union drive," Smucker said. "I think the fact that we had carried out this big strike — by that time, we had won big pay increases. That was really inspiring for a lot of people."

Transparency is vital, as it opens opportunities for graduate workers across all campuses to re-examine ways their university could do better. Anwarzai shared how graduate workers at the University of Michigan talking about dependent health care made her reassess and consider how IU could improve its own health benefit system.

"To be honest, it's often hard to figure out what you can actually ask for, right? (That issue) didn't even occur to me," Anwarzai said.

Sometimes, successful union elections result in administration recognition, but not always. For example, Illinois, where the University of Chicago and Northwestern University are located, has better union election and protection laws than Indiana.

While speaking with The Herald-Times recently, Shy was nearly a thousand miles away, helping Dartmouth College set up and ready its polling locations for a union election that was hours away. She'd just ridden the high of successfully unionizing graduate workers at Johns Hopkins, but Dartmouth's victory was stymied when its administration tried to challenge some of the ballots.

The Bloomington campus strike was an instrumental learning experience for Smucker and other IU graduate workers, he said.

"It gives you this ability to move people around and sort of have lots of resources and critical moments," Smucker said. "And people are happy to do it usually because they've learned the skills of organizing in their own university and that they can easily go and help implement (elsewhere)."

Alongside four other IU graduate workers, including Anwarzai, Smucker found himself back to being employed by the UE, lending assistance to other campuses across the United States.

A lot of this initial help from UE staff begins with the first step: signing union cards. Once enough union cards are signed, the group can host a formal election where members can vote on whether to unionize.

Passing on the lessons from IU's graduate worker movement

During the fall 2022 semester, Anwarzai was split between teaching a class at IU and commuting to the Northwestern campuses in Evanston and Chicago, running trainings for Northwestern organizers and speaking with graduate students about signing union cards.

"IU is essentially like a training school for organizers who then go on to do a bunch of organizing elsewhere," Anwarzai said.

She and Smucker also attended organizational meetings held by on-campus graduate workers to provide clarity and help. Their experience with the IU strike proved to be invaluable, as it helped them lend advice on what it takes to sign graduate workers up.

The easiest method may be sending out emails and compiling newsletters, but even in this day and age, that's not how you actually reach people.

"That's actually not what helps organize a union and that's not how we organized the strike at IU. We organized the strike by talking to people. On the first day of the picket line, we had 800 people on the picket line," Smucker said.

Smucker and Anwarzai left their positions at UE to focus on their graduate programs, though both attest to the experience's lasting impact.

"I definitely think I'm not done organizing," Anwarzai said. "I've just learned how important it is for just academic workers to actually fight to preserve any sort of educational components of universities. So I'm definitely going to take that with me whether I go into organizing like long-term or whether I go into academia. Or both."

Reach reporter Rachel Smith at rksmith@heraldt.com.