The educational-services industry — a category that includes graduate students, faculty members, and undergraduates as well as K-12 staff — accounted for the majority of workers involved in labor stoppages in 2022, according to the Worker Institute at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
According to the 2022 Cornell-ILR Labor Action Tracker Annual Report, 60.4 percent of all workers who went on strike last year were part of the educational-services industry. This resulted in a total of more than 2.5 million strike days, the most of any industry.
A significant factor in education workers’ large showing can be attributed to one strike: the work stoppage at the University of California’s 10 campuses last fall, said Eli Friedman, associate professor and chair of international and comparative labor at Cornell’s ILR school, and an author of the report. That strike included roughly 48,000 workers, most of them graduate students, and lasted for almost six weeks. Its organizing union described it as the largest work stoppage at any higher-education institution in history.
Friedman said the UC strike certainly skewed the 2022 data, but it still represents what’s happening in labor movements nationally.
“The scale [of the UC strike] skews the numbers a little bit, but in terms of looking at the underlying dynamics, I don’t think we’re getting a misread of the labor movement or of labor conditions specifically in higher education by including what’s happening in California, because I think it actually does reflect these broader trends,” he said.
The Cornell analysis is based on a variety of public sources and collects data on both work stoppages and other labor actions. It groups K-12 and higher-ed workers under the category of “educational services industry.” Friedman said that without the UC strike, K-12 movements would likely make up the majority of labor activity in the educational-services industry because K-12 employs more people than higher education does.
Overall, education and health care are driving labor activity in the U.S. Friedman said this is because they are two industries that have had success with forming unions, which are losing ground in the private sector.
“The public sector has become the core of the labor movement,” he said.
Friedman predicts that higher education will see much more labor activity in the coming year, similar to what Starbucks experienced in 2022. As more graduate students unionize, like employees of the popular coffee giant did, they will form collective-bargaining units and begin to negotiate contracts. Strikes typically occur once contract negotiations have stalled.
Since December, graduate students at Yale University, Boston University, Northwestern University, the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Southern California have voted to unionize.
And at Temple University, striking graduate students recently voted overwhelmingly to reject a tentative agreement to end their three-week-old walkout on the Philadelphia campus.
Last year’s labor activity included a 52-percent increase in work stoppages relative to 2021, though the report’s authors noted this activity was still lower than earlier periods, like the 1970s, and falls short of recent increases documented by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2018 and 2019.
Risa L. Lieberwitz, professor of labor and employment law at Cornell’s ILR school and academic director of the Worker Institute, said labor activity on college campuses in the past year has been notable because of the large numbers of people participating in work stoppages and the wide range of workers involved.
Lieberwitz, who also serves as general counsel for the American Association of University Professors, said the Covid-19 pandemic brought attention to job security and working conditions in higher education, which spurred labor-organizing efforts. Another, and somewhat less recent, factor she pointed to was the 2016 National Labor Relations Board ruling that allowed graduate students at a private institution, Columbia University, to unionize. And longer-term changes, like the widespread decrease in tenure-track faculty, also set the conditions that unionization efforts responded to, she said.
Generational shifts in opinion about organized labor are another factor in the recent uptick in unionizing activity, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, in New York City.
“People are now seeing unionization as the best mechanism for improving their working conditions, whether they are on campus or off campus,” he said.
In a 2021 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 69 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 said unions have a positive effect on the country. Herbert said this generational shift has increased unionization efforts across many industries, and that the pandemic also helped drive that growth in organizing across higher education.
Herbert said that unlike private companies, most universities have abstained from union-prevention activities in recent years. Some institutions, including the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, have neutrality policies regarding their position on unionization efforts.
According to data from the National Center at Hunter, the number of graduate assistants represented by a union went up by over 10,000 people in 2022.
Herbert attributed some of the rapid growth in higher-education labor movements to undergraduates, namely resident assistants and dining staff, who chose to unionize.
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