Between March 19 and April 5, graduate student workers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) staged our first-ever strike. The work stoppage shut down the largest university in the country’s third biggest city. We were up against an intransigent, anti-union administration — and we won.

The strike was a rebellion against the neoliberal university model, which prioritizes “revenue generation” over education and research by exploiting students and workers. It was a challenge to the narrative that graduate school is a kind of hazing ritual and that grad workers should simply adjust themselves to poverty and misery.

UIC grad workers — who mostly work as teaching assistants and course instructors — are paid a minimum salary of $18,000 per year while having to pay up to $2,000 back to the university in the form of fees, leaving a paltry $16,000 to live on in Chicago. This despite the fact that we provide one-on-one attention to students, do the bulk of the grading, and frequently serve as the primary instructors for courses of as many as sixty undergrads.