University of Chicago graduate employees, after more than a decade of organizing, will finally get to vote for our union, Graduate Students United, on October 17-18. But the university administration — helmed by President Robert Zimmer, who led the charge to take away private-sector grads’ bargaining rights more than a decade ago when he was provost of Brown University — is relying on the looming threat by the Trump administration to once again take away our right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act, and is doing everything it can to try and prevent graduate employees from having a voice in their work and their future.

The latest move by the administration included petitioning the National Labor Relations Board to stall the grad workers’ union election after weeks of hearings culminated in the board’s regional director finally ordering an election. The problem isn’t that the university is worried about whether they can afford a union for its graduate workers — Zimmer has admitted that unionization wouldn’t significantly impact the university financially, and in any case, UChicago currently pays enough in hedge fund fees each year than it collects in undergraduate tuition. He knows they can afford to provide better health insurance, living wages, and affordable childcare.

But for some reason, despite many years of what Provost Daniel Diermeier calls “continuously improv[ing] the graduate experience,” these basic benefits which our colleagues at many other institutions — including public institutions facing severe budget crises — enjoy continue to prove beyond the imagination of the UChicago administration.