Uniting Academic Workers: Graduate Workers Organize with the United Auto Workers Lindsey Dayton Columbia University Rudi Batzell Harvard University On Friday December 9, 2016, Columbia teaching and research assistants elected the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers (GWC-UAW) Local 2110 as their union with 1602 yes and 623 no votes. 1 On December 22, a prelim- inary count for the Harvard Graduate Students Union-UAW was not conclusive, with 314 challenge ballots exceeding the margin between 1,272 yes and 1,456 no votes. 2 Both elections were possible because the National Labor Relations Board, ruling on a suit brought by Columbia students, overturned a 2004 deci- sion that prohibited the formation of graduate unions in private colleges and universities. 3 Graduate student unionism is typically understood as the latest battle in a long war over the “corporatization of the university, ” a process by which univer- sity administrations began, in the 1980s, to think of postsecondary education as an “emerging market” that can be measured in terms of “income outcome” instead of a public good premised on the preparation of critical, informed, and civic-minded democratic subjects. 4 Graduate worker unionization efforts are not only a response to economic restructuring in higher education, but also a part of struggles to expand and protect democratic possibilities in the postwar United States. “Corporatization” has had many effects on the university, but one that especially frustrates graduate students is the way a model of competition in academic labor (for scarce teaching positions and grant funding) works hand- in-hand with the formulation of undergraduate students as consumers to make graduate teaching and research assistants indispensable, invisible, and precarious all at once. The decline of full-time faculty positions, seen in the cor- responding explosion of adjunct teaching and postdoc research positions and the shrinking pool of tenured faculty and grant-funded principal investigators (PIs), has, as any graduate student nearing completion can tell you, put enor- mous pressure on PhDs. 5 The flexibility—precarity—generated by a competi- tive labor market is a symptom of a great divide between the vision of higher education as a public good, a cause worthy of the sacrifice of many years of apprenticeship, held by many faculty members, and the reality of higher educa- tion as economic enterprise that flourishes on a flexible and cheap pool of teach- ing and research work provided by graduate students, adjuncts, and postdocs. International Labor and Working-Class History No. 91, Spring 2017, pp. 164–173 # International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2017 doi:10.1017/S0147547917000011 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547917000011 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core . IP address: 54.70.40.11, on 22 Dec 2018 at 12:18:08, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms .