Over the past few decades, both public and private universities have increasingly relied on austerity to shore up budgets, threatening job security and working conditions for academic workers across ranks. Job expectations for graduate students and postdocs have increased, while future prospects dwindle. Adjunct faculty and faculty not seeking tenure have been forced to accept higher teaching loads for lower wages and minuscule benefits. Even tenured faculty — those who have “made it” — find themselves squeezed for productivity, with teaching and service expectations rising while program and salary cuts threaten job security.

Throughout this big squeeze, academics have increasingly realized that their teaching and research labor produces value far beyond the wages and benefits they take home. This surplus is gobbled up by their officially not-for-profit institutions, then regurgitated largely in the forms of real estate speculation and six- or even seven-figure salaries for an ever-expanding class of administrators. In particular, graduate student workers across the country — forced into dual status as both students and workers, but whose teaching and research labor makes universities run — have recognized their vulnerability to exploitation based on real and perceived threats to career advancement for refusing to enthusiastically participate in an industry that piles on arbitrary labor while giving little in return.

In 2016, for the third time in less than two decades, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decided to recognize graduate student workers at Columbia University as employees, flipping the status of workers at private universities from “just students” to “student-employees with collective bargaining rights,” an encouraging development for organizers across the country. Ongoing organizing efforts faced serious challenges during the Trump administration, with organizers fighting to keep drives alive while the anti-union Trump NLRB made explicit threats to the rights of private university graduate workers to join unions, at the same time giving universities cover to deny free and fair union recognition elections by effectively cutting workers off from the NLRB election process.