of Unionism Among Graduate Students, Post-Docs, and Faculty in Higher Education and MD Residents and Interns in Hospitals

Authors:

Sarp Ufuk Nalbanto lu, Richard Freeman

Date Created:

2025-01-01

Course Title:

Professor:

Not specified

About Paper:

Over the past decade, university campuses have seen a notable dataset of unionization activity in higher education, including a surge in union activity, encompassing organizing drives, collectivemaster database of all NLRB cases involving universities, as well bargaining, and strikes, across a wide range of constituencies, as targeted datasets on representation cases, union employment from dining hall staff to graduate students. This shift has been contracts, and specialized groups such as student athletes. These particularly pronounced in private-sector institutions following a data are supplemented by qualitative interviews and survey landmark 2016 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision responses from key stakeholders across a representative sample that affirmed student employees’ rights to unionize and bargain of institutions. Drawing on this mixed-methods foundation, we collectively. Yet despite the broad momentum, not all private plan to conduct a network analysis to examine how stakeholders, universitieshaveexperiencedunionization, raisingquestionsabout including employers, employees, unions, and legal advocates, what drives these divergent outcomes. interactduringunionelectionsandcollectivebargainingprocesses. Existing scholarship on campus unionization remains fragmented, Finally, we aim to explore how these interaction patterns relate to observable outcomes, such as election results and negotiated often limited to case studies of individual institutions or contracts. Wehopethatbyofferingacomprehensiveempiricaland specific categories of campus labor. In response, this study relational account of campus unionization, our study will provide adopts a systems-level perspective, treating the university as an a foundation for future scholarship on labor dynamics in higher interconnected ecosystem of diverse stakeholders with distinct interests and motivations. We have constructed a comprehensive education and inform both academic inquiry and institutional policy.

Abstract:

Over the past decade, university campuses have seen a notable dataset of unionization activity in higher education, including a surge in union activity, encompassing organizing drives, collectivemaster database of all NLRB cases involving universities, as well bargaining, and strikes, across a wide range of constituencies, as targeted datasets on representation cases, union employment from dining hall staff to graduate students. This shift has been contracts, and specialized groups such as student athletes. These particularly pronounced in private-sector institutions following a data are supplemented by qualitative interviews and survey landmark 2016 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision responses from key stakeholders across a representative sample that affirmed student employees’ rights to unionize and bargain of institutions. Drawing on this mixed-methods foundation, we collectively. Yet despite the broad momentum, not all private plan to conduct a network analysis to examine how stakeholders, universitieshaveexperiencedunionization, raisingquestionsabout including employers, employees, unions, and legal advocates, what drives these divergent outcomes. interactduringunionelectionsandcollectivebargainingprocesses. Existing scholarship on campus unionization remains fragmented, Finally, we aim to explore how these interaction patterns relate to observable outcomes, such as election results and negotiated often limited to case studies of individual institutions or contracts. Wehopethatbyofferingacomprehensiveempiricaland specific categories of campus labor. In response, this study relational account of campus unionization, our study will provide adopts a systems-level perspective, treating the university as an a foundation for future scholarship on labor dynamics in higher interconnected ecosystem of diverse stakeholders with distinct interests and motivations. We have constructed a comprehensive education and inform both academic inquiry and institutional policy.

Source:

Harvard / Charlotte Nakhla, Joshua Gorman, Hannah Marcus / 2025

Topics:

student, higher, education, university, unionization, union, case, institution, labor, stakeholder, campu, graduate

Co-authors:

@sarpufuknalbantolu143 , @richardfreeman144