I signed my first union card my first week of graduate school. It was August 2013, and I was about to start the PhD program in history at Yale. When I joined the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) (now Local 33–UNITE HERE), graduate workers had been organizing at Yale for nearly three decades. Over that time, we won real improvements in working conditions for graduate students because of funding, solidarity, and support from the other unions on campus, who believed in us even when we didn’t believe in ourselves.
Yale was not alone. Unions have invested over the last several decades in graduate worker organizing across higher education, first at public universities and more recently at private institutions like Yale — even though federal law until 2016 said that private-sector graduate workers weren’t really workers. With that support, graduate workers launched a tidal wave of…