Stanford University Graduate Workers Vote To Unionize

Stanford University graduate workers have voted overwhelmingly to form a union, with 94% of graduate workers voting in favor of unionization (1639 yes, 108 no). The vote, with an overall turnout rate of 51%, was announced in an email by the Stanford Graduate Workers Union (SGWU) on Thursday.

The SGWU is affiliated with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Workers (UE), which will serve as the official representative of eligible graduate students in collective bargaining with Stanford.

In a message to the campus, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell wrote, “we look forward to working in good faith with SGWU. As has been our position throughout the election process, we are dedicated to the success of our graduate students and to our education and research mission. These commitments will continue to guide us. We will provide information to our community about the next steps in the bargaining process as it becomes available.”

Attention now turns to electing a bargaining committee and establishing the union’s priorities. The SGWU email contained link to a bargaining survey, the results of which it said will “determine the contract we negotiate with Stanford’s administration.” The email indicated the bargaining team is expected to be formed in “a few weeks.”

According to reporting in The Stanford Daily, Chris Gustin, a fourth-year applied physics Ph.D. student and one of SGWU’s organizers, said that the union hopes that “all grad workers can fill out that bargaining survey to rank their priorities in bargaining.”

The SGWU also email stated: “We will also fight for fellows who Stanford excluded from the initial vote. We consider fellows to be full members of our union and encourage fellows to run for the bargaining committee and fill out the bargaining survey.”

With the vote, Stanford joins a growing list of universities – both public and private – where graduate students have unionized and in some instances gone on strike in attempts to secure better compensation, enhanced benefits, and improved working conditions for teaching assistants, research assistants and in some instances graduate fellows.

The recent wave of unionizing activities began with a United Auto Workers-led strike by academic workers, including thousands of graduate students, at the University of California’s campuses in 2022. That historic efforts has been followed by union activism on behalf of graduate students at several other major institutions, including Yale University, the University of Michigan, Indiana University, the University of Chicago, Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Southern California.

Several other universities have offered larger stipends and enhanced benefits either as a concession or a preemptive strategy to address graduate student demands. For example, the University of Pennsylvania announced that it would raise its minimum Ph.D. stipend to $38,000, beginning in the 2023-24 academic year. The increase is the largest one-time increment to graduate stipends in Penn’s history.

Other universities announcing substantial increases to their graduate student compensation include Duke University the University of North Carolina, Rice University and the University at Buffalo.