Graduate student workers at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, have been trying to unionize since the early 1990s. This fall, a new campaign for a graduate worker union began: in August of 2022, graduate workers began signing union cards, which were filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on October 24, 2022. A little over a month later, on November 30 and December 1, 2022, graduate workers at Yale voted in an NLRB election to form their union, Local 33–UNITE HERE.

On Monday, their efforts finally paid off: Yale grad student workers won their election to unionize by 91 percent margin. The victory comes in the wake of large, historic academic worker strikes in the University of California system and at the New School in New York City and other union victories at MIT and Boston University. Jacobin’s Caroline Reed sat down with Abigail Fields, a member of the union’s coordinating committee, and Ridge Liu, a copresident of the union, to talk about Local 33’s organizing efforts and why grad students wanted to unionize.