Members of the unofficial Duke Graduate Student Union gathered on the quad outside Duke Chapel last week with boxes of pizza they handed out free to any PhD student.
Engineering student Patrick Faught wore a button on his shirt that said, “Ask me about my union.” He’s been wearing it around campus, and getting more and more questions from fellow students as the union election approaches.
“It's a great icebreaker to talk to people I otherwise wouldn't,” Faught said.
Students who support a union have been working toward this election for years. Christopher Kilner was a first-year PhD student in environmental science when students tried to unionize six years ago. Now he’s about to graduate.
“I was here, way back in 2017, when the first union vote failed,” Kilner said. “So, to see it in my time here go from that to an opportunity to win — is really exciting.”
In 2017, many students who voted in the election tended to be divided between fields, with fewer students in STEM departments voting for the union. This time, organizers say they have more support from across departments. They believe they have the numbers to win.
Last summer, union supporters ran a membership drive. They say a “rapidly growing majority” of students who are eligible to vote in the election have signed union cards to join. They are considered a direct-join union now, but they need to win this election to be recognized.
“We started trying to fight for a legally recognized union with bargaining power, the power to sit down and bargain in good faith for a contract with Duke,” says out-going union co-chair Anita Simha, who studies ecology.
This week, about 2,500 PhD students from Duke University who serve as research or graduate assistants and are compensated for their work will receive ballots in the mail to vote on whether to form a union.
The outcome of the election will be determined by a simple majority of those who return mail-in ballots by Aug. 22. Union supporters say they hope to win by a landslide.
PhD students fight for cost-of-living increases, healthcare and worker protections
Unlike undergraduate students, many PhD students receive tuition waivers and spend more of their time teaching and doing lab research for the university than they do taking classes. Those students get paid with living stipends, but without a contract.
Duke did not make an administrator available to WUNC for an interview for this story. In a written statement, Frank Tramble, Vice President for Communications, Marketing and Public Affairs said:
“Duke supports the right of doctoral students to debate unionization and encourages them to vote in the election. The administration believes Duke’s relationship with our students is centered on education, training and mentorship, making it fundamentally different from that between employer and employee.”
Union supporters say they consider the years they spend teaching undergraduate classes, grading papers or conducting research unrelated to their own dissertations to be work.
“We make this university run,” Simha says. “Without PhD students, Duke would not be able to offer the high caliber classes that it does.”
This past year, organizers ramped up their efforts to unionize, scheduling regular walks through labs and offices to talk to fellow students about unionizing.
“If I ask, what issues are you concerned about when it comes to work, the number one thing I've heard is my rent has gone up by maybe $500 a month or something ridiculous,” Simha says.
The union sent a survey to PhD students asking about their top issues, and students responded with concerns about the cost-of-living, work restrictions on international students, and the need for comprehensive healthcare plans.
“We heard about healthcare a lot, especially dental and vision, and spousal and child healthcare,” Simha says. “Something a lot of people don't realize about grad students is that a lot of us are in our 30s and 40s and have families.”
The Duke Graduate Student Union has pushed for a $40,000 annual stipend. The university raised students’ stipends to $38,000 last fall after students announced the membership drive.
Union members also flooded administrators’ inboxes with emails asking for a reduction in parking fees, and got that too. Out-going union co-chair Matthew Thomas says they still want the ability to bargain.
“Getting collective bargaining rights allows us to not only get these things that we've won as a direct-join union, but to actually enforce them, and not just ask for things, but actually negotiate for them,” Thomas says.
This generation of PhD students has been energized by union wins at other universities, and by high profile unionization efforts at Starbucks and Amazon.
“Not only will we be the first recognized graduate student union in the South, but we'd also be one of the largest unions in North Carolina,” Thomas says.
Legal analyst says Duke’s strategy has been to ‘Delay, delay, delay.’
Jeff Hirsch, a labor law professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, has been watching this trend as graduate students at several private universities have recently won elections.
“By grossly lopsided margins,” Hirsch says. “Margins I have never seen before. So, it'll be really interesting what happens in this election.”
Hirsch says he’s been keenly interested in the efforts at Duke since it’s in his own backyard.
“It's just hard to unionize in the South,” Hirsch says, citing a long history of anti-union legislation limiting public and private sector unionization in southern states in laws that often originated during the Civil Rights Movement. North Carolina has the second-lowest rate of unionization in the country, at 3.9%, behind only South Carolina.
Hirsch says so far Duke University's main strategy has been to: “delay, delay, delay.”
“That's what a lot of employers do,” Hirsch says. “Delay is a killer for unions.”
One of the ways Duke has delayed union efforts already was by objecting to the students’ petition for an election by arguing they are not workers, challenging an established precedent set by the National Labor Relations Board in 2016. The university lost its challenge, as anticipated by observers like Hirsch.
The delay caused by that challenge pushed the union vote from spring into summer, when many students are not in Durham – or even abroad on research trips. Students who are eligible to vote will receive paper ballots in the mail and must return them in less than a month.
Hirsch says those kind of delay tactics could continue, even if the union wins its election.
“Duke has multiple opportunities to drag things out for potentially years,” Hirsch says. “Duke could say, ‘You know what, we're going to refuse to bargain.’”
That could turn into a legal battle in federal court, but Hirsch says that might also hurt Duke’s image as a high-profile university.
“They're not just your average sort of manufacturing company [that] no one has ever heard of," Hirsch said. "They can face public relations pressures, more than your average employer from a lot of different constituencies.”
Hirsch says the only way he foresees Duke changing its strategy is if the university’s attitude toward unionization affects its public persona in the eyes of alumni, donors or future students.
“If they were to change their stance at all, in any meaningful way, it would likely be because of something like that — any sort of risk to their brand,” Hirsch says.
It’s also possible, at any point, that the university could simply agree to recognize the union and start to bargain.
“Duke has not taken that path,” says student Matthew Thomas. “But we really do hope that Duke does take that path, because they still have the option to. There's still time — and we intend to win our election.”
