The successful strike in West Virginia and ongoing efforts in the UK, Arizona, and Oklahoma suggest that a grassroots labor movement led by teachers is rapidly growing. Now, as Janus v. AFSCME looms, another group of teachers — graduate students — have fought back against attacks on organized labor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

After nearly eleven months of unsuccessful bargaining and 195 days after our last contract expired, the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) began the strike on February 26, 2018. We refused to enter picketed buildings where our classes were held and we withheld our labor by immediately halting all teaching-related duties. In contract negotiations, GEO prioritized progress towards ensuring financial stability for graduate workers in the form of tuition waivers, fair wages, fee waivers, and support for health and child care. During the strike’s last days, GEO members occupied the university president and chancellor’s offices. After twelve days, GEO reached a tentative agreement with the university administration and the strike ended on March 10, 2018, after 98 percent of the membership voted to ratify the new contract.

The question of whether graduate student workers are fundamentally students or workers had a simple answer during our strike: we’re both. This dichotomy between student and worker, however, has been a persistent issue throughout the history of graduate employee unionization. Decisions made by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — both those prohibiting graduate students from collectively bargaining, such as Trustees of Columbia (1951), Aldephi University (1972), and Brown (2004), and those permitting graduate students to collectively bargain, such as Cornell v NLRB (1970) and NYU (2000) — have largely hinged on this conceptual question. Whatever the status of graduate student workers in the NLRB’s eyes, the reality of graduate education demands a synthesis of these identities.