Graduate Worker Unions Stand Together
If you are a graduate worker union—or other organization who would like to co-sign these demands—you can do so here!
If you are in Madison or Wisconsin, join us on Library Mall on April 17th!
A STATEMENT by and for graduate worker unions:
On April 17, 2025, graduate student workers across the country are joining the Day of Action for Higher Education, calling attention to the Musk/Trump administration’s cynical and multi-pronged attack on education at all levels. These attacks are the escalation of decades of cynical attempts by politicians, right-wing organizations, and the oligarchs who fund them to diminish the capacity and autonomy of educational organizations, which serve as a vital engine of innovation and opportunity for everyone. Our actions today follow on the heels of calls to Kill the Cuts, and to Stand Up for Science.
Graduate workers are a foundational part of higher education:
- We are teachers: As teaching assistants, writing tutors, lecturers, laboratory instructors, and research mentors, we are often the instructors that know undergraduate students best, and are first in line to meet their needs.
- We are researchers: Our intellectual and physical labor powers a globally exceptional engine of education, scientific discovery, and technological advancement.
- We are leaders: It’s no coincidence that many of the students targeted by the Trump administration’s illegal rendition are graduate workers. Graduate workers have often been in the vanguard of actions to defend and expand our educational and civil rights.
The University works—because we do!
We call on campus administration—university boards, presidents, chancellors and deans—to recognize this as the existential threat to their values and institutions that it is, and to meet it with solidarity, not obedience.
- Demonstrate the value of universities for their states and communities by recommitting to affordable and accessible education for all. Join your students, workers, and researchers in making an affirmative case for the value of university research and education for all states, communities, and people in the United States and the world.
- Defend all students and workers on your campus from censorship and intimidation. Do not concede to government interference in the classroom, the research lab, or the library.
- Do not cooperate with the illegal and thuggish attacks on international students’ and workers’ freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of movement.
- Affirm not only the right to protest, but the positive role of dissent in education and democratic society.
- Provide legal and administrative support for students and workers facing arbitrary revocations of their visas, green cards, and even potentially naturalizations, and embrace flexible work arrangements to allow those who are forced to leave the country or who cannot re-enter it to continue to contribute to the university community.
- Bargain with workers: Meet graduate worker unionization — and all unionization — not with the cynical union-busting and divisive politics of austerity, but with voluntary recognition, good-faith bargaining, and financial transparency so that we can meet these attacks united. Commit to a living wage for all workers, and to fully funding and supporting all multi-year funding commitments.
We call on journalists, media, and all of civil society: Do not lose the forest for the trees. The Musk/Trump administration despises the idea of an educated populace capable of dissent, and this is their north star in all actions on higher education. Biomedical funding cuts, kidnapped graduate students, stochastic terrorism, censorship demands, and attacks on public and private campus unions are all part of the same effort to destroy higher education.
Our institutions are far from perfect—as graduate students, we often bear the brunt of this—but the Musk/Trump administration and its allies do not want to improve education, they want to dismantle it. We must meet them with a united, positive vision for universities that serve everyone.
Signatories
With our UW union siblings, we are making specific demands of UW–Madison to put these principles into practice—read them here!