More than 13 years after their original campaign ended due to state law, graduate student research assistants at the University of Michigan have relaunched their push for unionization. On Aug. 19, the Graduate Employees’ Organization announced researchers would seek support for a union election in the hopes of bargaining for competitive wages and health care benefits.
In March 2012, Former Gov. Rick Snyder signed Senate Bill 971, which amended Michigan’s Public Employment Relations Act to exclude graduate researchers from the definition of “public employee,” effectively terminating GSRAs’ hopes for unionization. That changed in 2023, when House Bill 4497 reversed the 2012 decision and restored GSRAs’ collective bargaining rights.
GEO is the legal bargaining unit for Graduate Student Instructors and Graduate Student Staff Assistants, who fall under the protections of the union’s current contract. GSRAs, however, are excluded from these benefits. In an interview with The Daily, Rackham student Ben Litterer, co-chair of the GSRA caucus, said graduate researchers want union protections to prevent the University from cutting benefits without recourse.
“We really don’t have any sort of contractual protections for researchers,” Litterer said. “That means that when the going gets a little bit tough for the University, or for whatever reason, really, that can sort of trickle down and into the benefits that we have being cut without any real legal recourse.”
According to the campaign’s FAQ, the University typically gives GSRAs the same wages and health care benefits as those listed in GEO’s contract, but other benefits — including parental leave, sick leave, vacation time, a dedicated grievance process and an emergency fund for international students — are not guaranteed. Litterer said that because many of these benefits are left up to individual advisors to decide for their graduate researchers, GSRAs need a grievance process for unfair conditions.
“Not getting vacation time, not having time to go renew their visa, which requires you to travel to another country — I think that’s completely not acceptable,” Litterer said. “We need to have a mechanism to stand up for those folks.”
GEO’s contract also offers GSIs transitional funding, which provides students with one semester of financial support and other assistance to move away from unhealthy working environments or advisor relationships.
In an interview with The Daily, Rackham student Christa Ventresca, a former officer in GEO and a current GSRA, said they were particularly concerned about securing transitional funding for researchers at a time when limited or cut funding drives many students to take positions under difficult conditions.
“Funding is getting shot, (and) you’ve got a ton of students that can’t find a lab that has money to support them, or their only option is a very toxic (Principal Investigator),” Ventresca said. “They end up stuck, or they end up dropping out of grad school, and we end up losing a lot of this generation of scientists this way, which is just really sad.”
Litterer said many details about GSRA’s potential future contract with the University have yet to be determined because the campaign is currently focused on the unionization process.
“The specific solutions and the specific demands are going to be something that comes out of these collective discussions,” Litterer said. “The first thing we’re trying to do is just get the union formed and make sure we actually have that avenue to actually talk about that.”
Many GSRAs also hold positions as GSIs, which then includes them in the GEO bargaining unit. However, once their position as an instructor for a course ends, they lose the ensured protections of the GEO contract. Ventresca, who knew they wanted to teach when they started graduate school, said the difference in their guaranteed benefits while holding a teaching position compared to the lack of protections as just a researcher encouraged them to get involved in the fight for unionization.
“When I’m a GSI, I’m part of a union,” Ventresca said. “When I’m a researcher, I still get those benefits, but I’m not in the bargaining unit and things like that. Seeing the lack of protections for researchers and almost the need for awareness of this issue among researchers is really what started getting me invested.”
The campaign hopes to include both graduate researchers funded through the University and research fellows supported by external sources. Ventresca, who has held a federal grant for the past four years, said they worry the University may attempt to exclude fellows.
“Historically and with other unions, the school has argued that fellows aren’t employees because their money is coming from the government,” Ventresca said. “The thing that the University likes to ignore is that a chunk of your money comes from the federal government, but the difference is made up by the University, and our health care still comes from the University. So we still have all these benefits coming from the University, but they like to argue (that) because it’s coming from the federal government, we don’t count.”
Unionization requires at least 30% of GSRAs to sign authorization cards before a union election can take place. When a significant majority of GSRAs vote “yes” on cards, they will be submitted to the U-M Academic Human Resources office, which handles labor relations for the University. As of last week, more than 1,000 researchers had signed cards in support of unionization.
Rackham student Lavinia Dunagan, GEO Communications Committee co-chair and a research fellow herself, told The Daily it was important to collect cards from a significant majority of graduate researchers to increase the pressure on the University and the Michigan Employment Relations Commission to include fellows in the potential GSRA union.
“Not everyone agrees that research fellows are actually researchers or workers for the University,” Dunagan said. “One of the reasons that we want to have a supermajority of cards, rather than say like 30%, which is the legal minimum, or even 50%, is that it’s not actually clear that research fellows will definitely be included in the bargaining unit once we go through the legal process with MERC and the University.”
Dunagan also said she hoped more researchers would get involved in the campaign because GEO will also be bargaining for terms on their next contract, which expires in 2026.
“This year is a bargaining year,” Dunagan said. “It’s essentially a perfect time for people who haven’t been involved thus far to get involved because we’re actually going to be bringing concerns that grad workers have to the bargaining table with HR. … Those kinds of basic quality-of-life issues are things that can be addressed in a contract and through collective organizing.”
In an email to The Daily, University spokesperson Kay Jarvis wrote the administration acknowledges the GSRAs’ right to unionize and the impact they have on the University.
“We appreciate the valuable work of our graduate researchers,” Jarvis wrote. “The University of Michigan recognizes and supports the fundamental right of its employees to form unions and bargain collectively. The University remains neutral on the issue of union representation in organizing efforts.”
Daily News Editor Marissa Corsi can be reached at macorsi@umich.edu.
The post Graduate student research assistants launch campaign for unionization appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply