Brad Walchuk
On a cold and snowy February day, some 250 Teaching Assistants in the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3902, one of the oldest teaching/graduate assistant unions in North America, held a rally in support of their bargaining team on the last day of negotiations before they expected to trigger a countdown to a legal strike. A day later, and in even worse weather conditions, dozens of graduate assistants at the University of Chicago, one of the newest teaching/graduate assistant unions in North America, rallied and served their employer an intent to bargain notice in an effort to secure their first collective agreement since winning their union election in the fall.
For anyone who follows organized labor with a close eye, the fact that young workers – millennials – would brave a snowstorm in two separate cities, on two separate days, at two separate employers in support of their collective bargaining should come as no surprise. In fact, even to the casual observer, there has been an increased recognition of the growing interest of millennials in organized labor. A recent piece in The Nation asserted “millennials have a keen sense of what they’re up against in the new economy, understand the challenges and opportunities of taking action at work, and, see unions are a springboard into the jobs, and justice, that they need and deserve.” Going a step further, a widely read op-ed in the New York Times suggested not only that millennials are increasingly turning toward unions for a stronger voice at the workplace, it also claimed – rightly – that we should lead the next movement. As Professor Larry Savage of Brock University and Professor Stephanie Ross of McMaster University have stated, these are “not our dad’s unions anymore.”
Campuses
In many respects, university campuses – such as the two described above – represent a logical ground zero for a revitalized, growing, and militant labor movement. Teaching/graduate assistants have been unionized since as early as the 1970s at many Canadian universities, and at a variety of public universities in the United States. However, a recent decision by the National Labor Relations Board that teaching/graduate assistants at private universities could unionize has led to a flurry of union drives at campuses across the US, including Duke, Harvard, Northwestern, Saint Louis, Yale, University of Chicago, University of Rochester, and Syracuse University, among others.
Despite the skyrocketing costs of post-secondary education, millennials have flocked to the universities – largely because our parents told us that post-secondary education was the key to getting a good job. For many of us from Southern Ontario or the American rustbelt, a post-secondary education was seen as the ticket out of the physical demands of working in a steel mill, automotive factory, or some other form of heavy industry. Ironically, many of parents were wrong. In many cases, the factories and steel mills have disappeared, or are at least less prominent than they were, but the good jobs that we were supposed to get from our university education are often nowhere to be found.
Many of us remember, however, the good aspects of these often unionized industrial jobs – the decent pay, the health and dental benefits, the pension – despite their physical toil and gruelling shift work. As Kashana Cauley aptly stated in her New York Times piece, “the union newsletters my father kept in our bathroom magazine rack may have faded, but their message — about the value of jobs that provide a fair wage, reasonable conditions and the ability to care for a family — is as timely now as it ever was.”
Indeed, for many post-secondary students (and recent graduates), the message about good jobs, fair wages, and the opportunities they provide carry significant weight. At the university campus, especially for those of us who are enrolled in, or who have completed some level of graduate study, the worries about decent work after graduation are a source of stress. We’ve done everything we’re supposed to – been diligent, studied hard, enrolled in university, and moved on to graduate studies – but many of us can envision ourselves being worse of than our parents. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that millennials are turning toward unions for a chance at the good life that many of us saw our parents live. At the very least, the choice to unionize provides a voice at the workplace and offers some hope of combatting the worst aspects of neoliberalism.
Tuition fees and precarious work
With the exceedingly high costs associated with attending post-secondary education, and especially from the additional years of enrolment and tuition in graduate school, many graduate school students come from solidly ‘middle-class’ backgrounds (or, to be more accurate, the children often unionized working-class parents – autoworkers, steelworkers, teachers, civil servants etc.). Many of these graduate students have witnessed the benefits of unionization, or at least the benefits of traditional, standard employment. When given the opportunity to secure some of these same benefits through on-campus academic work, millennials presented with a unique opportunity.
Faced with the prospects of precarious work after graduation, or worse, the dreaded unpaid internship, it makes sense that millennials are increasingly looking toward unionization to protect the basic standards that many – though surely not all – of us saw in the employment of a parent or parents. The campus is increasingly a logical and safe place to do so. Already unionized graduate students in Canada and the US see the benefits of unionization from the first day of their employment, in terms of wages, benefits, and working conditions (though improvements on these fronts are still needed) and have the opportunity to secure even further increases through collective bargaining. A growing number of non-unionized graduate students in the US, especially those for who unionization was not legally possible until just over a year ago, are taking the opportunity to secure a collective voice in the conditions that they work under.
While it is certainly true that millennials are largely supportive of unions and are increasingly finding their voice in the labor movement, this is especially true of graduate student workers on university campuses. In fact, two days after the rally at the University of Toronto and the day after graduate student workers at the University of Chicago served notice to bargain, the Pennsylvania State Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate assistants at Penn State have union rights under the state’s labor relations act. This ruling provide the Coalition of Graduate Employees at Penn State University (CGE-PSU) the opportunity to organize nearly 3,800 graduate assistants into a union. If recent results at other universities are any indication, thousands more graduate worker millennials will say ‘yes’ to a union.