A crowd of graduate student workers exited the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning at 12:30 Tuesday afternoon, stepped onto a sunny patio and gathered in a circle. Other students sitting on nearby concrete benches and focusing their attention on laptop computers looked up. Those passing through on their way between classes slowed to take notice. Most of the grad workers carried signs.
“Ready to vote, ready to bargain,” they read. Then there was a large one: “Union now.”
A new semester is underway at Pitt, and life on the Oakland campus is settling into familiar patterns. For the grad student workers, that means a continuation of their efforts to organize a union under the banner of the United Steelworkers. The problem, they said, is that the university is dragging its feet. The grad workers’ rally was an effort to draw attention to what they called Pitt’s “union-busting” tactics.
By the end of the day, the union’s message would change — and its members would be celebrating “a huge win.” We’ll get to that in a minute. But first, a bit of context:
Grad workers teach classes, assist in teaching and conduct research for a university that now boasts a $1.2 billion research budget. They are among the university’s lowest paid employees and often have little control over their schedules, working conditions or benefits. A year ago, for example, grad workers struggled to deal with changes the university had unilaterally initiated in the employees’ health care insurance.
That change “was a very large catalyst for unionization, because our copays went up anywhere between 5 and 700%” depending on an employee’s circumstances, said Connor Chapman, a grad student worker and member of the union’s organizing committee. “The burden was shifted squarely onto us without any notice. That was a wake-up call for a lot of grad students that we should unionize and have a say in our health care and working conditions.”
Support for a union grew. Earlier this year, a majority of the more than 2,000 grad student workers signed union authorization cards. Those workers have been waiting for the university to submit to the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board a list of eligible employees so the process can move forward and the workers can vote on whether to unionize.
The PLRB set a deadline of Aug. 26 for the university to comply, workers said on Tuesday. During a brief rally outside the Cathedral, they called out Pitt administrators for the delay.
“If we cannot rely on Pitt to follow legal requirements, we cannot count on the university’s good graces to give the workers what we deserve,” said Chi-Tsung Chang, a grad student worker in the university’s English department. He stood on a bench to address the crowd gathered before him. “That’s why we are unionizing.”
He was followed by Lauren Wewer, a grad worker in the mechanical engineering and materials science department.
“The administration is delaying because they don’t want to pay us what we deserve,” she said. “They don’t want us to hold them accountable. But a supermajority of grad workers — grads who work in the Cathedral, grads who work in labs, grads who work in hospitals, grads who work in classrooms, a supermajority of us — are ready to vote for our union.”
Things changed more than seven hours later. Chapman announced an update online: “As a direct result of this demonstration of collective power, pitt admin submitted a list of eligible graduate workers to the pa labor board,” he wrote on X, the platform once known as Twitter. “This allows the election process to move forward and is a huge win for pitt grad workers.”
The university later acknoweldged that it had, indeed, submitted to the PLRB and USW a list of eligible workers.
“As it is early in the term and appointments are still being processed, there may be additional names added to the list as we move forward with the PLRB process,” a university spokesperson wrote in an email. “As the University shared in recent months, we respect graduate students’ agency and self-determination to undertake a unionization effort, and we are following the PLRB’s process. We will continue to work with the United Steelworkers and PLRB as we move toward an election.”
What issues are most important to the grad workers? Pay is certainly one. Wewer said she and her colleagues need raises that keep up with inflation. But compensation isn’t the only thing on the workers’ minds. “We need real protections against advisers who harass and bully their grad students,” Werner said.
Chapman added that grad student workers need the agency provided by a union. As it stands now, they have little power.
“A robust grievance procedure would do a lot for graduate workers,” he said. “We are near the bottom of the academic totem pole.”
The rally was brief — only about 10 minutes. Those attending were in the middle of a workday, after all. But before the crowd broke up, Caroline Layding, a grad worker in the biostatistics department, reminded everyone that, together, they have strength.
“Pitt runs on our labor,” she said, “and it’s time that we get the respect that we deserve for that.”
As she ended, the led the crowd in a chant.
“What do we want?” Layding asked.
The workers shouted back: “Our ballots.”
Steve is a photojournalist and writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he is currently on strike and working as a Union Progress co-editor. Reach him at smellon@unionprogress.com.