AUGUST 19, 2025 — A message from U-M graduate researcher-organizers:
Over the past 50 years, graduate student instructors and staff assistants at the University of Michigan have achieved great successes through collective bargaining with the university. Last bargaining cycle, unionized instructors won a 20% raise over three years, a $20,000 fund for international students’ immigration costs, and transitional funding for grads in abusive working relationships. While graduate researchers at the university benefit from some of these wins, we lose out on benefits such as a vacation policy, visa fee reimbursements, and access to emergency funding.
Graduate researchers at U-M face challenging workplace conditions as well as external threats from the federal government—both of which negatively impact our ability to conduct our research and lead dignified lives. Among these issues are a local and national cost-of-living crisis, unprecedented cuts to federal grant money, targeting of international researchers, and the dismantling of DEI programs. U-M has not only abandoned graduate researchers to face these problems alone, but has actively antagonized its most vulnerable populations. Although navigating these structural difficulties is often intractable at the individual level, community organizing and collective bargaining have been successful techniques for addressing these problems and ameliorating their effects.
GSRAs and Fellows have been active but unrecognized participants in GEO for decades. In 1977, a Michigan court decision formally removed graduate researchers from the union soon after its formation. In 2013, inclusion of graduate researchers in GEO was blocked by the passage of a state bill which left no legal pathway to unionization. This legislation was recently repealed. In response, graduate researchers have begun the process of unionization, accretion with GEO, and joining their fellow grad workers at the bargaining table. So far, over 900 researchers have signed unionization cards, representing significant support for this effort and a desire to democratically shape the future of graduate research at U-M. This fall, we will file for an election with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission and vote on joining GEO in order to be part of bargaining this year.
As graduate researchers, we play a central role in the university’s basic functions. Research at U-M leads to life-saving medical treatments, renewable energy solutions, and critical measurements of the national economy. U-M reported a record $2.04 billion in research volume during fiscal year 2024, including $1.17 billion in federally sponsored research expenditures. Michigan Medicine alone attracts hundreds of millions of dollars of grant money every year to its research arm—a research arm which hosts hundreds of graduate researchers. U-M’s graduate schools are consistently ranked among the best in the country because of our research output.
Despite our crucial labor, graduate researchers have been unable to bargain with U-M. With no enforceable contract, the working conditions of researchers are precarious and subject to the whims of administrator judgement and funding cuts. Today, we announce our efforts to unionize graduate researchers at U-M and accrete with GEO, forming one union for all graduate workers and building on a half-century track record of fighting for affordability and dignity.
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