I love doing my PhD in philosophy. I love the autonomy I have over my work. I can write about anything from basically anywhere. Seeing my students develop as thinkers and understand what it means to engage with arguments is one of the most rewarding things I do. My colleagues are wonderful; they are insightful and generous with their time. But the parts of our work we love are precarious. Our wages don’t keep up with the cost of living, and many research and teaching assistants don’t have adequate health benefits. The future of academia is uncertain: permanent positions have disappeared, and public funding for colleges and universities has declined. Shared governance over the institution is eroding, and public trust in higher education is fragile. Many graduate student workers—including me and my colleagues—are organizing unions to protect what we love about our work.
Unions are groups of employees that act collectively to improve their working conditions. Unions that are certified by the National Labor Relations Board have the right to collectively bargain over those working conditions. Working together, employees are able to negotiate for and win improvements to the workplace they couldn’t achieve on their own: increases in pay, protections for intellectual property like research and teaching materials, and protections for victims of harassment and discrimination.
I was in a union during my master’s, but I wasn’t a particularly engaged member. I paid my dues, I voted in the elections, and I read the emails. But I had other stuff going on in my life. I thought doing anything else would take time away from my research. During my second year, university admin decided they would not pay provincial health insurance premiums for international students after a change in regulations. My MA program was about 80% international students, and we made about $12,000 a year living in metro Vancouver. I had to do something for my friends. So, I went to a union meeting. We started with a letter-writing campaign and a petition. I volunteered to draft the faculty letter template. My advisor signed it and circulated it to other faculty and other department chairs. A few months later, with combined pressure from graduate students and the faculty union, the admin agreed to pay the premiums.
My PhD program didn’t have a union when I started in 2021; I joined the campaign in the summer of 2022. The campaign was spreading only through word of mouth and graduate workers hadn’t started signing cards (forming a union usually requires at least 30% of workers in the proposed unit to sign authorization cards supporting unionization). When my colleague asked if I supported unionizing, I said yes, thinking of my friends from my MA. I even said I would help organize.
Organizing means building relationships with people and increasing the group’s capacity to act together. It’s hard: it takes a lot of time, and you often face rejection, apathy, and even hostility. Understanding what people like about their job and the issues that would motivate them to act for change usually takes multiple conversations. Many graduate student workers—myself included!—are afraid of what might happen if their advisor finds out they support unions. A lot of the time, the same things motivating people to unionize—poor relationships with professors, precarious funding, worries about visa status—are the same things making them hesitant to publicly support unionization. Even just finding people to talk to, I’ve made dozens of cold calls and sent hundreds of texts and thousands of emails. Most people don’t answer; other people ghost you. When I have talked to people, some people refuse to engage; others have fascinating ideas about what being in a union means (one person told me we don’t need a union because they don’t believe in the labor theory of value).
One of the things I’ve always loved about philosophy is that it forces you to be honest with yourself and others about the reasons for what you believe; organizing is not so different. Good philosophy, I think, leaves you shaken: it confronts you with arguments you don’t know how to respond to and forces you to think about what is true about the world. I remember lying awake at night because I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the cogito or Peter Singer’s argument that I needed to donate most of my income to alleviate global poverty in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” Organizing makes you relate to people one-on-one; they can see through what you aren’t committed to. When you hedge—“if you have time,” “if you’re not too busy,” “if you’re interested”—they think it’s not important to you. I learned to be more direct. And when you can’t answer their questions about how unionization will help solve their problems like retaliation or lower pay rather than aggravate them, you haven’t met your conversation partner as an equal. If you are building something together, that means valuing what they have to say and taking it seriously. Unions are, in large part, about building a more democratic workplace, and that starts with relating to people as equals.
The work of organizing continues even once people support unionization. It means following up over and over again. It can mean asking about signing a petition or a card, filling out a survey, ratifying this or voting for that, coming to a meeting, or talking to a friend. In my union, we went public with our card campaign in April 2023 and filed for election that October. I spent hours every week finding workers and talking to them about their issues: pay, lack of protection from reprisals, lack of job security. After cards, we had to organize to win our union election by an overwhelming majority in May 2024. This meant finding my coworkers, getting them the information, and asking them to vote for a union. After the election, we needed to elect a bargaining committee, conduct a bargaining survey, and ratify the initial bargaining demands. We needed, and still need, to organize to win this first contract. This means showing up to the bargaining table with the support of all our members. After we win our first contract, there will be future ones to organize for.
I like that the work goes on. It is like research (especially philosophical research) in that way. Inquiry doesn’t stop once we feel like we have good arguments or evidence that something is true. We find more arguments to examine it; we build off that and find something new. We talk to more people and get their perspectives and their arguments on the issue. Organizing means taking others as equal partners in building something new. You have to listen to where they are coming from and understand that you might need to change, too. Sometimes, working together in this way, we can achieve things that we didn’t think were possible when working alone. The direction can be (group?) mind to the world: as we organize, changes to our conditions that weren’t even conceivable become possible. Recent graduate student worker contracts have won things that might have been unfathomable a decade ago: access to retirement benefits, paid dental and vision benefits, and protections for non-resident and non-citizen graduate student workers against federal immigration officials accessing their information. Organizing can transform our conditions of possibility.
I had a lot of jobs before grad school. I filled orders at an office supplies warehouse, packing boxes with paper and pens. I spent a summer making ice cream and working on a taco truck. I was a resident assistant, teaching assistant, research assistant, and editorial assistant: all the different kinds of assistants. During law school, I interned for a public school district’s office of general counsel and a state attorney general’s office. Working on my PhD in philosophy—training to be a professional researcher and teacher—is easily the best job I’ve ever had. And it’s because I love my work that I organize with my union.
Lauren Perry
Lauren Perry (she/they) is a joint JD-PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include administrative law, the public/private distinction, and group agency. She is a proud organizer and elected bargaining committee member with GETUP-UAW.
