Graduate Workers at Stanford University Are Organizing a Union
The higher ed unionization wave may soon reach Stanford University, where graduate student workers are trying to form a union. Jacobin spoke with two worker-organizers about their organizing effort.
Stanford University campus. (Frank Schulenburg / Wikimedia Commons)
Joining a wave of graduate student unionization efforts in higher education, grad workers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, are seeking to form a union. The union drive comes in the wake of successful union votes among grad students at a number of other prestigious private universities this year, including Yale, Northwestern, and Johns Hopkins. That unionization wave has taken place amid a broader climate of militancy in higher ed: nine thousand faculty members at Rutgers University are now striking, months after a successful faculty walkout at the New School in New York City and a historic 48,000-strong academic worker strike in the University of California (UC) system. Last week, Jacobin’s Sara Wexler sat down with two worker-organizers with the Stanford Solidarity Network to discuss their organizing effort and what they hope to achieve with a union.
Sara Wexler
Can you tell me why you’re trying to organize a union?
Tania Flores
We have five platform points that address five of the most critical issues that we’re facing as grad workers at Stanford. The first is increasing precarity and a lack of affordable living conditions for grad workers and their families at Stanford, and an increasing lack of accessibility to Stanford graduate work for folks who have families, folks who have student loans, who have debt, people who come from low-income backgrounds, people of color. The cost of living in our area is so high, and Stanford does so little to meaningfully address that. Our living conditions over the last decade have become more and more precarious.
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