University of Chicago graduate students at the March on the Boss rally, a pro-unionizing event, held May 25, 2017CLAUDIO GONZÁLESIn a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election last week (October 17-18), University of Chicago teaching and research assistants voted to authorize Graduate Students United (GSU) as their collective bargaining representative. With about two-thirds of eligible students participating, the results were 1,103 for and 479 against.
This outcome “means that a strong majority of the students want a say in decisions on campus,” says Daniela Palmer, a sixth year University of Chicago evolutionary biology graduate student, who is a departmental organizer for GSU. “Legally, [it] means that we now have the power to bargain collectively in good faith with the university.”
[The university] threw everything possible at them to stop this from happening, and the students did an amazing thing. It should be a message to graduate students everywhere that it is possible.—Paul Davis,
Cincinnati State Technical and Community College
The election was made possible by an August 2016 decision from the NLRB, an independent federal agency that oversees labor law in the United States. Its decision stated that graduate student ...
