Date of Award
December 2019
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Geography
Advisor(s)
Jonnell Robinson
Subject Categories
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
A 2016 NLRB decision that made graduate labor unions legal has contributed significantly to a wave of graduate organizing, continuing a 50-year history of graduate unions. This research investigates this contemporary wave of graduate unionization using two papers, which take a theoretical and an empirical approach respectively. The first paper uses a Marxist analysis to connect the narrow antagonism between graduates and management with larger-scale phenomena that involves other workers too, such as the growing population of contingent academic workers. It describes how corporate interests have influenced higher education and administrators have become managers of workers in order to help serve capitalist interests. The second paper is an empirical investigation into the strategies that graduate unions are pursuing in this third wave of graduate union organizing, based on interviews from twelve graduates from eight different unions across the country. Graduate organizers discussed their unions’ experiences of building and maintaining an organization that represents and forwards the interests of the body of graduate workers at their institutions, as well as how their unions are connecting with other communities and developing broader targets for action. The goal of these papers is to understand the nature of contemporary graduate employment as well as to develop insights that organizers have gained in their experiences organizing in unions.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Walker, Anthony, "The Third Wave of Graduate Labor Unions" (2019). Theses - ALL. 384.
https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/384
