Duke Graduate Student Union Marks Three-Year Anniversary

This article is a transcript of a USSW interview with three DGSU workers.

Jaeyeon Yoo: On this day in Southern labor history, August 22^nd 2023, the Duke Graduate Student Union won our NLRB election.

Anita Simha: We became the first unionized graduate workers at a private university in the South.

Kerry Eller: And the largest union election to be won in North Carolina since 2008.

Yoo: Something that was really incredible about our 88% extremely majority landslide win was how hard we had to organize to get there.

Simha: Graduate students at Duke had been organizing for quite a while, but in 2016 the National Labor Relations Board overturned its previous decision and declared that grad students were indeed workers employed by the university, and so they were eligible to unionize.

Yoo: In 2016 there was a union election, but it failed, and some part of that was due to the large amount of union-busting Duke was doing.

Simha: Even though DGSU didn't win recognition in that moment, it sort of set the stage for us to win in the future.

Eller: In the summer of 2022, I remember being in a meeting with a few other organizers and suddenly was thrown into this whirlwind of, "We're actually going to do this thing this year - this is the year we're going to become a recognized union. What's our game plan?"

Simha: We formed an organizing committee, made assignments, and hit the ground running right when the academic year got started - canvassing every single department, mapping and charting to make sure we knew who all there was to connect with, and forming real relationships.

Yoo: When we launched our card drive in 2022, we were immediately met with the highest pay raise Duke had given us so far. We got jumped to $38K. That was Duke's direct response to us launching our card drive, because clearly they didn't want us to unionize. We knew from the beginning that pay and stipend were maybe the number one concern on the table for most graduate students, because the living wage in Durham kept going up and our stipends and salaries weren't keeping up. So that was a really exciting incentive to keep organizing and launch our card campaign, which continued until we filed in February.

Simha: We were able to officially submit our petition for unionization with a strong majority of grad students signed on, and at that point Duke sort of had two choices: either recognize us or fight us every step of the way. Of course, they chose to fight.

Eller: The university tried to overturn not only our right to organize as grad workers, but also the right for grad workers across the country to unionize. They were just trying to string the election process out more. We were able to get about 40 people to turn out to this hearing process. The university wasn't expecting that many of us, and the lawyers immediately were quaking and trying to come up with ways to make the hearing process go quicker once they realized how many of us really cared about this.

Simha: Grad students were pretty fed up with a lot of our working conditions. We were paying over $500 a year just to park - paying to work. Our wages weren't keeping up with inflation. In some cases, grad student workers were complaining of mold and snakes in their building after flooding. A range of conditions that had a lot of us felt left behind.

Yoo: Once we realized we had a summer election, we really needed to scramble, because it's summer and a lot of people are out of town doing fieldwork or research. It involved a lot of phone banking and telling people, "We have an election and it's happening right now."

Eller: On the day of the election, I was standing in this conference room space that we had reserved for everyone to come have a big watch party with us while they tallied the votes at the NLRB office in Winston-Salem.

Simha: It felt really special to be in the room where they were opening envelopes and just saying "yes, yes, yes" over and over.

Eller: There was this big energy in the room as we watched the "yes" votes start taking over, like two whiteboards worth of space, while the "no" votes on the other side of the room were still only a few hand widths wide or so.

Yoo: The moment I realized we'd won, I was like, "Oh my God." It was a really incredible moment, but I couldn't do anything because I was sitting there with a pencil and needed to keep marking the votes. I was just sitting there thinking, "We won, we won, we won," and trying to do the mental math in my head. It’s not my strong suit, since I'm a literature person. Then it got to the point where even I, with my math skills, knew we had won by a vast supermajority. All of us, the Duke grad union people in the room, wanted to just stop and party, but we needed to count through the rest of the votes until we finally got to those thousand "yes" votes. It felt like one of the biggest events I've been part of in my life so far.

Simha: It felt particularly significant to win so big in the South, because I think the South often gets discounted as a place to organize. Even though we had fewer resources than other grad unions across the country, there were enough of us across campus who were ready to step up and be leaders that we were able to win. We were only able to win because so many of us were ready to fight. For me, winning this election was a great, tangible reminder that when we fight, we really can and do win.