Illustration by Tevy Khou
This article was produced by Capital & Main, an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. It is co-published here with permission.
Ranjani Murali, 36, finally grasped the brass ring. After six years as a graduate student and then seven more in a temporary training position as a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), she has secured an assistant professorship at a research university. Next year, she will be setting up her own biology lab at her new job. But looking back at the hundreds of 12-hour days she spent pursuing her passion, Murali wonders whether she should have had to toil so long while earning so little. She wants the next generation to have a less arduous path.
Murali joined graduate students and fellow postdocs, who labor in the school’s labs or assist in teaching, in filing for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) late last month, citing low pay, long hours and high housing costs. Students also say they want to address abusive working conditions that are exacerbated by the highly competitive nature of their field. Should they prevail in an election, the bargaining unit, which would be affiliated with the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), is poised to represent more than 2,000 postdocs and graduate workers. The Caltech students are following the lead of student workers all over the U.S. who are seeking to unionize to improve working conditions on their campuses.
The last two years have seen a wave of organizing in higher education, prompted by strong support for unions among young people; the COVID pandemic’s effect both on working conditions and awareness of labor issues; and the organizing efforts of industrial unions like the UAW. The surge is also enabled by an Obama-era NLRB decision that recognized graduate teaching assistants and researchers at private universities like Caltech as employees with the right to unionize. During 2022 and 2023, unions established over 38 new bargaining units representing more than 40,000 student workers, according to William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Science and engineering students are often considered less politically engaged compared to their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences. But early-career scientists and engineers have spearheaded recent unionization efforts, including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Caltech rival; the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland; New York University; Washington State University; Tufts School of Engineering in Medford, Massachusetts; and on the New York City campuses of the Weill Cornell Medical College and the School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where postdocs recently voted to strike. “The stereotype doesn’t hold anymore that STEM graduate students are not going to support unionization,” said Herbert.
Caltech union organizers say they want recognition for the critical work they do at one of the country’s most prestigious science campuses. “The vast majority of papers that are published from research at Caltech come from grad students. We run the experiments, we collect the data, we analyze the overwhelming majority of the data, we publish those results, we write grants to bring money into Caltech,” said Michael Greklek-McKeon, a fifth-year planetary science student, who is frequently up all night collecting data.
Jessica Goodheart
Michael Greklek-McKeon, a fifth-year Caltech planetary science student
For their work, which typically also advances their studies, Caltech graduate student researchers earn a stipend of about $41,000 per year. Caltech doctoral students also labor as teaching assistants, providing direct instruction for undergraduates. Murali, who received a PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, before securing her Caltech postdoctoral appointment, earns a $68,000 annual salary. Postdocs—who mentor graduate students while also conducting research—now spend more time in these temporary training positions than they did a generation ago due to the rising number of postdocs relative to available tenure-track positions. Meanwhile, Caltech professors are the best paid instructors in the U.S., earning an average salary of $220,000 per year in 2021, according to The Business Journals. (Science and engineering postdocs also tend to find permanent jobs in industry or government.)
The Caltech administration, for its part, has opposed the campaign to unionize graduate students. The university has retained New York-based Proskauer Rose LLP, widely regarded as a law firm that works to oppose unionization efforts, and has communicated its opposition to the effort in emails to students and on a website that told students that unionization “is not in the best interest of our graduate students, our postdocs, or our broader research and learning community.”
A Caltech spokesperson elaborated the administration’s position in an email to Capital & Main: “The Caltech culture allows for and encourages direct representation and robust dialogue among members of the community. Students and postdocs have direct access to Caltech leadership as individuals and through existing campus leadership organizations and as such inform and shape their experience in a meaningful manner.”
But the administration is pushing back against a rising tide of support for unionization among young people. Seventy-seven percent of workers under 35 approve of unions, according to a Gallup poll. Student workers are also overwhelmingly voting for unionization when given the opportunity. On average, 91% of eligible student workers voted in favor of unionization in elections in 2022-2023, according to a report published by City University of New York (CUNY) School of Labor and Urban Studies. A supermajority of Caltech researchers and graduate students signed cards in support of the union, according to student organizers.
Caltech student organizers point to labor activity at the University of California, where 48,000 postdoctoral students, teaching assistants and researchers walked off the job last year. The strike that spanned 10 campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was the largest in higher education in U.S. history and resulted in substantial pay gains for workers, as well as protections from harassment and other benefits. After the University of California settled those contracts, Caltech increased graduate student stipends by 17%. Greklek-McKeon described the timing as “curious.” The Caltech administration told Capital & Main in an email that the increase “resulted from conversation that started in July 2022.”
Greklek-McKeon has been priced out of Pasadena, where Caltech is located and the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $2,240, according to Apartments.com. He commutes 20 minutes to campus in his 2001 Honda Odyssey from San Gabriel, where he lives with five roommates in a house with some funky features, like one bedroom that is a converted garage. His bedroom is a “weird, patio-like room” detached from the main house. Last year, he had to get emergency dental surgery, a several thousand dollars out-of-pocket expense that he could ill afford. The university offers its student workers a dental plan that provides a maximum benefit of $1,500.
Caltech also covers “at least 80% of students’ health care plans costs,” according to Kathy Svitil, an administration spokesperson. The administration’s efforts to raise health care premiums for graduate student workers early in the pandemic led to the formation of a student group to protest those hikes.
More than one-third of all graduate students and postdocs spend more than 40% of their monthly stipend on rent, and more than 60% worry about making ends meet, according to an online survey of 251 grad students and postdocs that Caltech Grad Researchers and Postdocs United (CGPU), the group working with the UAW to form a union, shared with Capital & Main.
The organizing effort extends beyond economic concerns; student organizers also seek to address a perceived power imbalance between graduate student workers and supervisors. In the sciences, faculty supervisors exert enormous control over students’ research, publications and future employment, said Erin Hatton, a sociology professor at the University of Buffalo, who has written about labor relations at university science departments. Graduate students’ “entire careers are in the palm of their advisers’ hand,” she said. Graduate students are also “effectively bound to a lab,” according to Hatton. “If they leave the lab, or if they’re kicked out of the lab, their grad career is probably over.” Some abuse that authority, students say.
More than 46% of grad students and postdocs who responded the CGPU survey report experiencing or witnessing bullying behavior, sexual harassment, or discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, race, disability, or immigration status. Ryan Rubenzahl, a sixth-year astronomy student, said that students he knows have been subjected to racist and belittling remarks by supervisors. They have had “senior lab members” take credit for their work or been asked by professors to do “excessive side projects” or “grunt work on non-thesis-related projects.”
“Before organizing, I had very little appreciation for just how common and widespread this was,” Rubenzahl said. Students say a grievance procedure, a typical feature of union contracts, could curb abuses and improve the climate on a campus where overwork is prevalent.
Jessica Goodheart
Elina Sendonaris, a third-year Caltech graduate student
In late November, Murali and her junior colleague, Elina Sendonaris, a third-year graduate student in applied physics, discussed campus culture at Caltech at an outdoor café near campus. They talked about “imposter syndrome,” a feeling that one’s success is unearned, about difficult professors shielded by the “eccentric genius stereotype,” and about the vulnerability of international students whose visa status depends on their university jobs.
They also stressed what they liked about the environment at Caltech. “It’s a field of driven people. We don’t want to stop that,” Sendonaris said.
Hatton, the sociologist, says it will take more than a union to provide a “real counterweight” to the power dynamics that affect graduate students laboring in scientific labs. But unionization could lead to a shift in self-perception. “When you don’t see yourself as a worker, then you don’t see yourself as someone who has rights as a worker, who should be paid as a worker, who’s not doing something just out of love,” she said.
Sendonaris said a union would make the university more meritocratic, not less, because all students would have a chance to thrive.
“I hope this changes academia broadly,” Murali said.
“It gives hope,” Sendonaris said.
