About 3,400 graduate student workers at the University of Southern California (USC) filed a petition to form a union with the National Labor Relations Board.
The Graduate Student Workers Organizing Committee said in a Dec. 14 statement they are unionizing because they hope to negotiate higher pay and improve working conditions in the future.
“Graduate student workers across all departments power teaching and research at USC,” the statement read. “By joining the wave of academic organizing in higher education, they are seeking to raise the bar for academic workers everywhere.”
The group has also joined United Auto Workers (UAW), a national labor union representing 75,000 higher education workers—including the 48,000 University of California academic workers who launched the largest academic strike in history last month….