It has been nearly six months since Princeton Graduate students voted to not form a union with the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE). Graduate student employees cited a number of reasons for the failed vote, like Princeton Graduate Students United’s (PGSU) organizing tactics, vague and nonspecific promises from union organizers and an inability to directly address important questions posed to them.
The failure of last year’s vote does not indicate that graduate student unionization is incompatible with an Ivy League university — in fact, unionization has been successful at every Ivy League but Princeton.
At Princeton, a specific dynamic was prominent: the grad students were voting on whether to unionize with a closed-shop union, United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE). In a closed-shop union, all workers are required to be members, and many attacks against the unionization effort were made on that basis: You’ll be forced to pay dues, and the union will make political statements on your behalf!
While these claims may not be explicitly anti-union, this spin fundamentally misunderstands how unions work. It is critically important that after this anti-UE campaign, Princeton students learn about one of the most important steps in a union’s collective bargaining, which comes before students start paying dues: the democratic process. And it’s a problem that PGSU didn’t communicate this when they had the chance. Looking into the future, we can learn from these mistakes.
In a March 2023 ‘Prince’ column, Himawan Winarto GS made one of these arguments, writing “The union due, 1.44 percent of our gross salary, is compulsory, meaning that every student will have to pay between $689 to $778 next year.” He is right — but this is not the full story.
A vote to unionize does not mean graduate students immediately must begin to pay dues. If the vote had succeeded, a bargaining committee composed of graduate students, representatives from UE, and those from the University would begin the process of negotiating an agreement on terms such as pay, benefits, and grievance procedures. This process can take up to a year.
Following this, a second vote occurs, where students would have the opportunity to accept that agreement. Only at this point, assuming the vote were to succeed, would students begin paying dues. This allows graduate students to evaluate if the contract negotiated on their behalf is worth the price of union dues, keeping in mind that this first contract is only a starting point.
This democratic process appears in all aspects of union organizing — workers in the union vote on not just these contract negotiations, but also for union officers, who vote on the policy goals and positions of the union. When UE takes a position, it is not because some back-room union bosses have decided on it — that’s a much better description of how most companies take stances — it is because the position has been decided through practices like polling and data collection of union members. UE, specifically, emphasizes the democratic process, deciding on the political stances that the union takes through national conventions to which locals send delegates.
Had this democratic aspect of organization, an elementary concept within unions, been clearly and candidly communicated to graduate students, perhaps the vote would have had a different outcome. This would have required PGSU to make it a priority to be a trustworthy source of information about unionization, rather than just an organizational group.
In the future, organizers should see it as crucial to promote the democratic process as an integral part of unions and the collective bargaining process.
Regardless of what union students choose to organize under, it is critically important that organizations like PGSU are prepared to answer questions posed to them, with informed, fact driven responses. As aforementioned, every other Ivy League institution has succeeded in forming a union – and this isn’t because they have all organized under the same union or all negotiated the same contracts: different schools have different needs. It is because of a common denominator of clear, active, and united efforts on the part of organizers.
Looking into the future, even if graduate students choose to pursue organizing under another union, like United Auto Workers, Communication Workers of America, and American Federation of Teachers, the success or failure of establishing a union comes down to the efforts of organizers, not necessarily the specific practices of the unions. Student concerns must be addressed. Without transparent, worker-centered dialogue and assembly, unions face a steep uphill climb. This is not just in the case for graduate students, but for all workers.
And the clock is ticking. Assuming President-elect Donald Trump allows for the National Labor Relations Board to keep its democratic majority until the Democratic board members’ terms end in 2026, there is still time for organizing before the landscape around unionization changes. But after this, the Board may attempt to ban graduate student organizing entirely — if Trump’s first term is any indication. Right now, the door is not closed for unionization – and ultimately, it’s up to graduate students to decide what they would like to see in their futures.
Lillian Paterson is a first-year from Silver Spring, Md. She can be reached at lp3095[at]princeton.edu.
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