Only 12 hours away from an impending strike, the graduate workers of Stanford University secured a strong tentative agreement on their historic first contract. The members of UE Local 1043, the Stanford Graduate Workers Union (SGWU), ratified this contract on November 22, 2024 with over 85 percent voting in favor.
This contract represents the culmination of over a year-long bargaining process where we, Stanford graduate workers, fought to secure our rights and improve our working conditions as teachers and researchers. "The wins in this contract are the result of hundreds of hours of hard work,” said Liam Sherman, a graduate worker in physics. “From organizers going on walkthroughs to workers rallying on the engineering quad, thousands of graduate workers stood up and said that they deserved better than the status quo."
Winning this contract was an incredibly tumultuous process, shaped by Stanford's long-standing history of demeaning, deprioritizing, and undervaluing the labor of its graduate workers. After 11 months of Stanford stalling and failing to offer real protections and benefits at the table, 2,500 graduate workers pledged to go on strike if a fair contract was not reached. When Stanford subsequently offered an insufficient contract, the members of UE Local 1043 overwhelmingly voted to reject it and authorized the bargaining committee to call a strike. The tentative agreement was reached just hours before the strike was set to begin. The extensive protections secured in the contract will propel transformative improvements in working conditions at Stanford.
Contract Wins
Work culture at Stanford has long been plagued by appalling cases of discrimination and harassment. High-profile cases of faculty who have taken advantage of graduate workers include those of Jay Fliegelman, Franco Moretti, and Vincent Barletta. "Navigating threats to our labor and our persons without reliable processes has been the burden of too many Stanford graduate workers," said Chloé Brault, a graduate worker in comparative literature. In fact, a Stanford survey showed that only six percent of graduate students who experienced discrimination and harassment made a formal report, revealing a broad distrust in Stanford’s internal processes for handling these issues. Securing a robust nondiscrimination article in our contract — one that provides meaningful recourse for those impacted by discrimination, harassment, and power abuse — was therefore a central focus of our campaign. “Our members made clear to Stanford that they were not going to compromise on non-discrimination protections,” said Parth Nobel, a bargaining committee member in Electrical Engineering. “Through our resolve, we won first-in-the-country protections around the supportive measures inside of Title IX processes, as well as industry-leading protections on abusive conduct and real and timely recourse for all forms of discrimination.” In the few short months since we signed our tentative agreement, other unions across the country have already built on the gains we have achieved. “We’re excited that other unions like Cornell Graduate Students United (UE Local 300) have already built on the progress we made in this area and are looking forward to the gains that other grad unions will continue to make in the future,” added Parth.
This contract also comes with real increases in our compensation (13-16 percent over the three-year contract), and unprecedented protections against rent increases. With approximately 70 percent of our bargaining unit living in Stanford on-campus housing, graduate workers face an extremely precarious position with Stanford exerting immense control over them as their employer, landlord, and school. “No one is immune to the housing crisis, least of all graduate students who already have to spread low stipends across other costs of living,” said Amanpreet Singh, a graduate worker in law. “Stanford can mitigate these harmful effects, and we knew any fair union contract would have to include a provision that controlled these extreme housing prices.”
Though Stanford initially insisted it would never negotiate over housing, the looming strike compelled an unprecedented concession: the university revealed planned on-campus rent increases for the duration of the contract and, crucially, ensured these increases would not exceed the corresponding rises in graduate worker compensation on a percentage basis. This is a first for any higher education contract in the United States.
Our contract also contains an important victory in restoring free access to local commuter rail for graduate students who live off-campus, through the Caltrain GoPass. Stanford used to provide the GoPass to off-campus students, but in 2022 the university discontinued the program for graduate students only, while continuing to provide the GoPass to other employees. “The GoPass will save the 30 percent of graduate workers who currently live off-campus up to nearly five percent of their pre-tax income and provide on-campus workers the freedom to seek cheaper off-campus housing,” said Fletcher Chapin, a bargaining committee member in Civil and Environmental Engineering.
In other economic benefits, we achieved a substantial victory in moving towards equity between domestic and international graduate workers, as our contract ensures international PhD workers receive a lump sum of $1,200 to cover visa and other government fees and costs associated with maintaining their legal status. Furthermore, we secured improved coverage for costs associated with vision, dental, and treatment of chronic medical conditions and mental health conditions for all graduate workers. We also got Stanford to increase grants that support workers with dependents. In addition to economic benefits, we fought for a wide variety of workplace protections. Our contract now enshrines the right to disability, religious, and lactation accommodations; gender-neutral bathroom access; free menstrual products; significant improvements in workplace safety; full coverage for all necessary training; strict protections against overwork; and a flexible and protected leave policy.
One major issue for our members was that of guaranteed funding. Although Stanford has claimed since 2020 to provide guaranteed continuous funding for all PhD students, this vague promise often went unfilled, and rang hollow in graduate worker ears. At the final moments of negotiation and with a massive strike looming, we were able to extract from Stanford a long-needed detailed written policy on how the funding guarantee works in practice, and specific commitments on how no PhD student can have their funding cut off from failure to secure grants or fellowships. Moreover, we received a letter from the university ensuring that the union can assist graduate workers through the process of requesting funds in the event they run into issues. We intend to hold Stanford to its word.
As graduate workers, it is stressed over and over that we are trainees and that our work does not matter because we are still learning. In the early stages of negotiations, we fought with our employer for weeks to be called “Graduate Workers” in our contract instead of students. By the end of negotiations, we had explicitly won an acknowledgement of our professional status, giving us a new level of freedom in the workplace. Though some of these steps may seem minor, asserting that graduate workers are entitled to a degree of dignity and respect in the workplace comes with very real benefits, as seen in our discipline and discharge article. In academia, there is often one advisor who has total control over your career, making discipline and discharge a matter of personal discretion in the worst case. Winning guarantees for progressive discipline and just cause for discharge will provide much needed protections against arbitrary dismissal.
Contract Campaign
The contract fight began years before we ever sat down at the bargaining table. The organization that would eventually become the union started as the Stanford Solidarity Network. In its early years, the organization served as a place for graduate workers to advocate for better working conditions by, among other things, fighting for dependent healthcare coverage and demonstrating solidarity with local unions. After the university’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we began to direct our efforts into unionizing the graduate workers of Stanford. We started to seek affiliation with national unions and chose UE. “The primary reason we ultimately chose to affiliate with UE was their commitment to autonomy of the union local, meaning that we, as graduate workers, are assured full power over our union’s decision-making power and dues,” said Gabi Basel, a graduate worker in chemical engineering. “UE understands that our power as a union comes from workers’ solidarity and that union leadership exists only to assist and advise.” When we launched our card campaign on April 3, 2023 a record 2,571 graduate workers signed union cards in one day. Two months later, 94 percent of graduate workers voted in favor of unionization in our NLRB election.
Local 1043 members kicking off bargaining with a rally in November 2023.
From the start, Stanford was adamant in its refusal to give us any substantial wage increases. Its first proposal offered only a 1 percent raise to most graduate workers. With the pressure exerted by our membership by the strike pledge, they inched this number up to 2-3 percent. At this point, our membership voted overwhelmingly to reject this contract, and 88 percent (over 2,000) voted to authorize a strike. After some further movement on their wage offer, in the days leading up to the strike, Stanford abruptly cut off negotiations and refused to negotiate with us unless we accepted their terms. However, facing immense public backlash, they softened their stance within three days. Then, 12 hours away from the strike, a tentative agreement was reached. In these final days, critical gains in nondiscrimination, funding, and benefits were also reached.
Hostility from Stanford was not just encountered at the bargaining table. At the rally we held when we launched our strike pledge, with over 500 graduate workers in attendance, Stanford repeatedly threatened union leaders for exerting our legal right to demonstrate on campus, insisting we restrict ourselves to a specific “free speech zone” area of campus. We refused to give into this intimidation, and Stanford ultimately failed to follow through on its threat, filing only a frivolous unfair labor practice charge against the union for exercising its legal right, a charge which was later withdrawn. Notably, when we publicly announced our plans for pickets during our strike to occur outside of Stanford’s designated free speech zone, they issued no more such threats to us.
SGWU also saw great support and solidarity from other local labor organizations. “SEIU local 2007, the Stanford service workers' union, was simultaneously renegotiating their contract with Stanford during our fight for a first contract,” explained Thom Chaffee, a bargaining committee member in geophysics. “SGWU and SEIU 2007 showed out at each others' rallies — crowds were filled with purple and red t-shirts — and worked together to push back against the bosses.” SGWU representatives also met with local labor councils, the South Bay Labor Council and the San Mateo Labor Council, to discuss beginning a long and empowering mutual struggle for labor rights in Silicon Valley.
What’s Left for the Future
Despite this strong and historic contract, intransigence from our employer has left the masses of Stanford graduate workers with a clear vision of what is left to accomplish in our next contract fight. For example, despite performing the same work as everyone else in the union, research fellows (those paid in lump-sum “fellowship” payments, as opposed to those on Stanford payroll) have been unjustly excluded from the bargaining unit, as Stanford has taken advantage of ambiguities in developing federal labor law. Although the unity of our membership as a whole enabled us to secure the same economic contract benefits for fellows, they will, for now, be excluded from key contract protections (such as the right to arbitration in cases of harassment or discrimination) through the grievance procedure. Fighting Stanford’s attempts to divide our membership will be a priority for us going forward.
Additionally, despite the real gains we secured in wages and other economic benefits, the cost of living at Stanford is among the highest of any location in the United States. This contract lays the foundation for our members to return to the bargaining table next time, pushing for the transformative economic changes in living conditions that our membership needs and our labor deserves.
Moreover, with the new presidential administration and its hostility to organized graduate labor, our union is preparing to mobilize in defense of its rights as workers. A priority for SGWU going forward to is to further organize our membership to assert our power as workers directly through rank-and-file militancy and building direct worker-to-worker organizing, to remind Stanford that our power comes not from federal regulation, but the concerted action of our researchers and teachers who keep Stanford running.
The Local 1043 (SGWU-UE) bargaining committee consisted of Martín Acosta Parra, Jason Anderson, Jason Beckman, Thom Chaffee, Fletcher Chapin, Emma Cuddy, Nora Enright, Chris Gustin, Nadine Humphrey, Sheen Kim, Paul Markley, Shantanu Nevrekar, Parth Nobel, Rory O'Dwyer, Suyash Raj, Alexa Russo, Kamila Thompson, Sophie Jean Walton, Sofia Di Toro Wyetzner, and David Kai Zhang. Former members are Francisco Barrera, Ed’d Bhagwandeen, Christie Chang, Orisa Coombs, Noah Cowan, Joshua Head, Gabriel Panuco-Mercado, Joe Mernyk, Vishnu Sarukkai, Adela Zhang, and Julian Zumbach. They were assisted by UE General President Carl Rosen and UE International Representative Andrew Seber, Fields Organizers Esther Kamm and Catherine Wilka, Project Organizer Tom Ladendorf, and countless rank-and-file organizers past and present.