May Day, 2024, was a day of celebration for over 3,500 graduate student research and teaching assistants at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn): we had just won our National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election in a landslide and formed the largest new private sector union in Philadelphia in over half a century. By October, we elected a bargaining committee, ratified our initial bargaining demands, and headed into negotiations.

Just a few weeks later, US voters elected Donald Trump back to the White House. At first, we wondered whether we would need to develop new organizing strategies to confront this obstacle. But ultimately, the same strategy that won our union election — developing a broad and deep network of worker leaders throughout the workplace — also won our first union contract. These leaders built supermajority support and moved their coworkers to take an escalating series of actions together. Workers from the University of California and Mount Sinai proved the success of that organizing strategy, and our campaign taught us that it works regardless of who is in the White House.

Still, the Trump administration presented new challenges. Unlike the dozens of new higher ed unions that organized after 2020, we could no longer count on the NLRB to enforce labor law, since filing an Unfair Labor Practice charge could give the Republican-controlled board an opportunity to overturn student workers’ right to unionize. Meanwhile, the Trump administration leveraged public research funding to extract political concessions from universities and encourage them to adopt new regimes of austerity. And it undertook frightening deportation measures, putting international workers — about one-third of us — under additional fear and uncertainty. To win our first contract, we had to overcome these obstacles.