Julie Kushner’s unionization efforts usually center on those in the working class: cabdrivers, child-care workers, secretaries. But it made good sense to her when a group of graduate students at New York University asked for her help in 1998. “Why shouldn’t a worker at NYU providing teaching or research for the university have the same rights and protections as a person driving a cab?” she asks.
That question has guided Ms. Kushner in her behind-the-scenes role assisting graduate students in the decades-long legal and political fight to unionize. As director of the United Auto Workers region that encompasses New York City, Ms. Kushner helped score a big win this year when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate assistants at Columbia University and other private colleges had the right to form unions.
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Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle
Julie Kushner’s unionization efforts usually center on those in the working class: cabdrivers, child-care workers, secretaries. But it made good sense to her when a group of graduate students at New York University asked for her help in 1998. “Why shouldn’t a worker at NYU providing teaching or research for the university have the same rights and protections as a person driving a cab?” she asks.
That question has guided Ms. Kushner in her behind-the-scenes role assisting graduate students in the decades-long legal and political fight to unionize. As director of the United Auto Workers region that encompasses New York City, Ms. Kushner helped score a big win this year when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate assistants at Columbia University and other private colleges had the right to form unions.
She guided graduate students behind the scenes as they challenged private colleges.
The decision sparked a wave of union drives that, regardless of the outcomes, have drawn attention to how colleges treat doctoral students, and may galvanize graduate students’ efforts to push for higher stipends and better benefits.
Ms. Kushner, 64, came full circle with her work at Columbia. The first organizing campaign she led, starting in 1980, unionized clerical workers, a win still hailed today by labor activists as being ahead of its time in spotlighting pay inequities for minorities and women and in being led mostly by women. These days she oversees a seven-state region but still tries to stay connected to where she thrives: on the ground.
She spent nine days at Harvard University last month as UAW-affiliated graduate students voted to decide whether to unionize. (The results are pending.) She secured a pre-vote statement in support of the students from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts.
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Ms. Kushner was also a resource for student organizers at Harvard as they tried to counter what they called anti-union misinformation. For example, opponents of a graduate-student union there have said that a 3,500-member bargaining unit across dozens of departments could not effectively advocate for a diversity of interests. She provided the students examples of how the needs of groups within bargaining units had been addressed in previous contracts.
Major research universities are tough employers, and strong union leadership is needed to keep a drive from being derailed, says Kitty Krupat, a former doctoral student in American studies at NYU, who made the initial call to Ms. Kushner in 1997. “Julie’s very persuasive and charismatic,” she says, explaining why the students settled on the United Auto Workers. “She can sort of make you envision a path, not an uncomplicated one, but a path to victory.”
At NYU, Ms. Kushner made the case for a graduate union to reluctant professors by meeting with them in groups, eventually winning faculty support. The graduate students there won their legal right to unionize in 2000, in a landmark ruling by the labor board. But the victory was fleeting: A 2004 ruling involving Brown University undid that decision.
The students, however, never stopped organizing. After years of resistance, NYU voluntarily decided to recognize its graduate union in 2013, reinforcing for Ms. Kushner that the fight was not only legal but political.
It’s a message that Ms. Kushner embraces today, as the election of Donald J. Trump as president casts another cloud over the rights of graduate students to unionize. A change in the NLRB’s composition, likely under a Trump administration, would embolden colleges to bring graduate unionization before the panel again. The ultimate victory will be not at the labor board, Ms. Kushner says, but when administrators realize they’re “fighting the wrong fight.”
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“The Trump presidency and the labor board will make things more difficult,” Ms. Kushner says. “But I’m confident colleges will give up before we or the workers do.”
Vimal Patel, a reporter at The New York Times, previously covered student life, social mobility, and other topics for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
