Duke University Graduate Students May Soon Join the Higher Ed Unionization Wave
Graduate student workers at Duke University are in the middle of a union drive. If the effort succeeds, Duke will join a wave of private universities seeing their grad workers unionize. Jacobin spoke with some of the organizers.
(@dukegradunion / Twitter)
Graduate student workers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, may soon join a wave of private university grad worker organizing, after high-profile union wins at Yale, Northwestern, and Johns Hopkins just this year. The Duke Graduate Student Union (DGSU) has been organizing without university recognition since 2016; last September, it launched a card drive to build toward a union certification election. Jacobin’s Sara Wexler sat down with DGSU organizers to discuss the history of the union and the issues that workers hope the union will help solve, including lack of dental care and precarity for international student workers.
Sara Wexler
When did the organizing around unionization begin?
Matt Thomas
Duke had a campaign in 2016 and 2017, with an inconclusive result. So the DGSU decided to pursue a direct-join model for a union [i.e., the union has a formal structure and collects dues but is not officially recognized by the employer or the law]. We’ve been collecting dues from a small membership base since then. But this current drive started by us getting together in May of this past year and having conversations about filing and having an election again. We started building through weekly meetings all through the summer, and then we launched this card drive on September 15.
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