We are organizing to win a union. Over the last several months, graduate workers at Yale have had hundreds of conversations with each other about winning a union. Three major issues have come up often — the cost of living, access to health care including mental health care, and responses to instances of harassment and abuse. So, what could a union actually do to address these concerns?

Fortunately, we don’t need to look far for answers.  Graduate workers at Harvard, Columbia, Brown and beyond have in recent years come together to demand recognition for their unions and negotiate good union contracts that address exactly these issues — delivering real, material benefits to themselves, their families and the wider academic community. 

Amid the continuing challenges of the global pandemic and inflation hitting levels not seen in decades, Yale graduate workers are deeply worried about making ends meet. Average rent increased by over $300 per month in New Haven between 2018 and 2022. Last year, facing growing calls for unionization and mounting pressure from the Graduate Student Assembly, GSAS increased PhD stipends, including a 14 percent increase in pay for the humanities and social sciences. But these increases still do not provide a guarantee of a truly livable wage with the skyrocketing cost of living, nor do they ensure adequate pay increases in the future. It has taken nine months for our raises to even go into effect. Because we don’t have a real seat at the table, we have no guarantee of future raises that reflect our actual cost of living. Without a union and a contract, we just have to wait and see.

Things are different for our unionized colleagues. Columbia graduate workers negotiated compensation increases of at least 3 percent per year and Harvard graduate workers have similar raises securely in place. Even with the larger increase this year, PhD grad worker pay at Yale is significantly less than pay at Columbia and Harvard. At Brown, their contract requires that the university and the union negotiate each year to determine pay increases. The minimum PhD pay at Brown is now $42,411 per year, while the minimum pay at Yale is $38,300, more than 10 percent less. The cost of living is lower in Providence than it is in New Haven and Brown’s endowment ($6.9 billion) is six times smaller than Yale’s ($42.3 billion). The gap in pay is the union difference.

These contracts also boosted subsidies provided for childcare, a critical need for graduate workers with children. And for international graduate workers, the contract at Harvard includes a fund of $30,000 per year to help pay legal expenses related to international students’ ability to work at the university. Graduate workers at Harvard and Columbia won from their administrations a promise to cover 75 percent of dental premiums. Columbia’s union additionally pushed for the creation of a Student Employee Support Fund and a Student Employee Dependent Support Fund that collectively make more than $2 million over two years available for graduate workers to cover out-of-pocket medical, dental and vision expenses. 

Graduate worker unions have also been successful in winning stronger recourse and protections for graduate workers experiencing harassment, discrimination or abuse in the workplace. Right now, we have no independent recourse to deal with such situations. Yale has repeatedly refused to make even modest changes to its policies, rejecting calls to institute an Ombuds Office like the ones that exist at other Ivy League universities. At Columbia, graduate workers have a union contract that guarantees access to impartial arbitration or mediation in instances of harassment or discrimination, while Harvard’s allows for arbitration in all cases except for those falling under Title IX. Both ensure full transitional pay in the event graduate workers need to leave their lab or advising situations due to inappropriate behavior on the part of their advisor. 

We are organizing to win a graduate worker union at Yale for many reasons — namely, to make our university more democratic and because we want to be paid and treated fairly. Across the country, graduate worker unions are delivering the goods. We can do the same here.

Javier Porras Madero is a third-year graduate worker in the Department of History. Contact him at javier.porrasmadero@yale.edu. Sasha Tabachnikova is a third-year graduate worker in the Department of Immunobiology. Contact her at sasha.tabachnikova@yale.edu.