Student workers in higher education have been voting to unionize in droves in recent years, with a notable spike since early 2022. But the trend screeched to a halt at Princeton University last month, when graduate-student workers voted by a large margin against joining the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (United Electrical), with 391 voting in favor and 652 opposed. The vote means Princeton will remain the only college in the Ivy League where graduate students are not represented by a union.
Just days before the graduate-student election, postdoctoral researchers at Princeton voted by a margin of 484 to 89 to join the United Auto Workers union. The different results reveal some of the challenges faced by labor organizers in higher education.
The last time graduate students at an American institution voted down joining a union was in 2019 at the University of Pittsburgh, according to William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at City University of New York’s Hunter College. (Some petitions for elections have been dismissed for technical reasons or withdrawn without an election.) Students at the University of Pittsburgh have since filed again for a union election with the state labor board.
The rejection of forming a graduate-student union at Princeton is especially striking, Herbert said, because United Electrical has been very successful at organizing student workers. According to a paper by Herbert, Jacob Apkarian, and Joseph van der Naald, United Electrical was involved with seven of the graduate-assistant units formed from January 2022 to mid-2023, or 37 percent, more than any other union. Students on some of those campuses had previously rejected collective-bargaining units, including the University of Minnesota and Cornell University, Herbert said.
Herbert believes it is unlikely the Princeton elections will have much of an impact on other campuses’ unionization efforts. “The way that it’s been transpiring in higher ed since the end of the pandemic seems to be continuing with new filings and additional efforts at unionization around the country,” he said.
Princeton’s graduate-school dean, Rodney Priestley, said in a statement following the vote that more than 73 percent of the 1,523 eligible graduate students had voted in the election. The university had about 3,100 enrolled graduate students at the time of the election, but only about half of them were defined as workers.
“We look forward to finding opportunities to continue to strengthen our partnership with students to enhance the student experience and advance Princeton graduate education, guided by our unaltered commitments to Princeton’s research and teaching mission and to the success and well-being of all Princeton graduate students,” the statement said.
Priestley wrote in an email to all graduate students in April that he respected students’ right to vote but had some concerns about unionization at Princeton. Last year, Priestley sent students a memo with accompanying documents outlining the university’s position on the union’s demands.
Surprised by the Wide Margin
Princeton students on both sides of the unionization question said they were surprised by the results of the graduate-student vote, and by the wide margin.
Aditi Rao, a doctoral student in the classics department who was an organizer for Princeton Graduate Students United (PGSU), which was formed in 2016, said that the institution’s relatively high stipend for graduate students, which started at $47,880 for the 2023-24 academic year, means that students tend to overlook many other issues. Rao said the university also gave graduate students a pay increase of nearly 25 percent in 2022, just as the unionization effort was ramping up. “It’s a tough campus to organize, and so we knew that we were up for a fight, but we had no idea that the loss would be as significant,” Rao said.
PGSU pushed in its campaign for guaranteed affordable housing through graduation, improved support for international students, better grievance procedures, guaranteed cost-of-living adjustments, and comprehensive health care and child care.
Rao said that the university’s definition of a worker, and therefore eligible to vote in the election, included only those who were participating in research or teaching. Rao believes that definition favors STEM students, who she feels are less inclined to favor unions.
PGSU could have challenged the university’s definition, but doing so would probably have delayed the election, Rao said. If it were pushed past November, that could have presented a problem: Organizers worried that if a Republican were to be elected U.S. president, the National Labor Relations Board could reverse its current position that graduate students at private universities are employees with the right to collective bargaining.
“This being the first loss in five years after a really, really successful run of graduate-unionization campaigns … might say something about the direction of the movement and perhaps a wall that is there,” Rao said. “And so we’re going to have to do a lot of thinking and a lot of … strategizing about what organizing in a space like this means.” She said she and her fellow organizers intend to continue to work toward unionization.
Housing is a particularly thorny issue at Princeton, said Gaby Nair, a Ph.D. student in politics who commutes from Philadelphia, about an hour away by car, because housing is less expensive there. Many students struggle to find affordable housing in the local market and some end up having to move every year. Last year, she said, Princeton converted an undergraduate dorm into housing for graduate students, who have traditionally lived in graduate housing. “I think that also showed us how much the university’s definition of housing is just a bed, and not an apartment,” Nair said.
I don’t think Princeton spells any kind of doom for higher-ed campaigns more generally.
PGSU also pledged to better support the 45 percent of graduate students who are international students, by pushing for tax assistance, improved visa support, and grants to help with relocation expenses. Nair said international students are at a disadvantage in seeking external funding because of their international status, which means they can end up with more teaching responsibilities. That, in turn, can mean they have less time to devote to research, which makes them less competitive for the research opportunities they are eligible for.
But Nair doesn’t see the nationwide unionization trend slowing down anytime soon. “I don’t think Princeton spells any kind of doom for higher-ed campaigns more generally,” she said.
Himawan Winarto, a Ph.D. student in plasma physics, was among a group of students who urged their colleagues to vote against unionization, including through a website and a graduate-student Slack channel. Those students argued that United Electrical “will use our money and reputation to support divisive politics” and that it is “broke and relying on graduate students for a bailout.”
Winarto said he does not oppose the idea of unionization generally but felt that the push at Princeton was being forced on students. Those who opposed the effort emphasized that if the union were approved, students could not opt out of it, and stressed how much union members would have to pay in dues, among other concerns. Winarto also opposes some of United Electric’s positions on topics such as nuclear energy, defense spending, and divesting from Israel.
“We basically encouraged people to have open public discussions and people realized this is probably not what we want in Princeton,” Winarto said. “The Princeton system is different than other universities.”
United Electrical did not provide a representative to comment about the Princeton election prior to publication.
Jessica Ng, one of the organizers for the postdoctoral union, believes that campaign benefited from having many members who previously belonged to — and were helped by — unions in graduate school. “We’ve had this longer exposure to the shortcomings of academia, and a lot of us are really motivated to change the sort of structure of this industry that we’re in,” Ng said.
Postdoctoral researchers are also further along in their careers while still experiencing the financial stress from being broke during grad school, Ng said, and they are more likely than graduate students to have families to consider.
Ng said that Princeton offers many perks, including free food at events, generous funding for team-building activities, and professional development, which may sway graduate students to wonder whether it’s even worth fighting for more. “I think that the sort of golden handcuffs are perhaps stronger for grad students because they’re getting their degrees here and have, maybe, a bit more sense of dependence on the university” compared with postdoctoral researchers, who already have degrees, Ng said.
Even though both groups are working, she said, the employer-employee relationship is much clearer on paper for postdoctoral researchers.