Contribution to Book
Graduate Student Employee Unionization in the Second Gilded Age
Revaluing Work(ers): Toward a Democratic and Sustainable Future
(2021)
Abstract
In debates on the future of work, a common theme has been how work became less secure through the denial of employee status. Though much of the attention has focused on other industries, precarity has also affected those working in higher education, including graduate student employees, contributing to what is now called the “gig academy.” While universities have reassigned teaching and research to graduate assistants, they have also refused to recognize them as employees. Nevertheless, unionization has grown considerably since 2012, most significantly at private institutions.Utilizing a unique dataset, this chapter demonstrates that between 2012 and 2019, graduate student employees voted overwhelmingly for representation. The chapter contextualizes this growth within the history of their unionization movement. We argue that legal rights have been a predominant factor, with graduate assistants confronting, and frequently overcoming, their misclassification. Those experiences provide lessons for workers in other industries facing similar obstacles.
Keywords
- Graduate Assistants,
- Unionization,
- Collective Bargaining,
- Future of Work
Disciplines
Publication Date
December, 2021
Editor
Tobias Schulze-Cleven and Todd E. Vachon
Publisher
Cornell University Press
Series
LERA Research Volume
Citation Information
William A. Herbert and Joseph R van der Naald. "Graduate Student Employee Unionization in the Second Gilded Age" Ithaca, New YorkRevaluing Work(ers): Toward a Democratic and Sustainable Future (2021) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/william_herbert/47/
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY-NC International License.