Northwestern University Graduate Student Workers Won a Union Last Week
Last week, graduate student workers at Northwestern University voted to unionize by a landslide margin. We spoke to some of the worker-organizers about why they wanted to unionize and how they won.
Northwestern University Graduate Workers march in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo courtesy NUGW)
On Thursday, January 12, the Northwestern University Graduate Workers (NUGW) union announced victory in its union election, with 1,644 yes votes to 114 no votes — that is, with 93.5 percent of ballots cast for the union. The election win comes after six years of organizing by graduate student workers at the Evanston, Illinois–based university; it follows another recent victory by private university grad workers at Yale University and occurs against the backdrop of a wave of academic labor strike action. After the election, Jacobin’s Sara Wexler spoke with Eskil Elling and Audrey Nicolaides, Northwestern PhD students and organizers with NUGW, and Kitty Yang, the first cochair of NUGW, who is now a visiting assistant professor at Kenyon College.
Sara Wexler
When did the campaign for unionizing begin?
Audrey Nicolaides
The recent campaign that was successful started in September, so it’s pretty recent, but NUGW has been around for much longer. Organizers started the union around 2016. There was a first card campaign at the time, it didn’t pan out, and then we were organizing in the background. This fall, we decided to do another card campaign, which was successful this time around.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.