As worries about job prospects abound, Eaton said students are more apt to view assistantships as “a job like any other,” fueling desires for benefits that align with their stance. Add in high-profile labor wins at universities like Yale, Stanford and the University of Chicago, and the notion of having a union becomes a little less novel — almost, “infectious in a positive sense,” she said.

The news about unions at other institutions played the “most critical” role in turning the tide at Pitt, according to Healy.

“There are all these folks who, either they have friends who have unionized at other institutions or they showed up at some rally that they saw the grad students were putting on while they were in undergrad,” Healy said.

Students: Inflation is outpacing stipends

When Raya Haghverdi arrived on Pitt’s campus this year to begin her Ph.D. in marketing, she assumed the grad students were already unionized. After finding out they weren’t, she said she knew which way she was going to vote.

She witnessed the grad students at her alma mater, Indiana University, struggle to unionize and grasped its importance, particularly for students below the poverty line.

“As a business student, I do have some privileges. I kind of have, as far as I know, a higher stipend. I don’t need this union but I do believe in equity for every grad student because I don’t think that my work is worth more than anyone else’s,” Haghverdi said after casting a ballot at O’Hara.

Compensation has often come up as a point of dissatisfaction for Pitt’s grad student workers. While not all grad students work, those who do are paid annual stipends ranging from $20,600 to $34,515. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator, a single adult in Pittsburgh needs to make $43,957 to get by.

Some students have said their stipends don’t match up with what they need to survive, especially in the face of inflation. Previously, the university defended its compensation to PublicSource by citing the health care and transportation costs it covers for students, which a spokesperson said lowers the cost of living.

Oscar Fawcett, a second-year statistics Ph.D. student and organizer at Pitt, pushed back against that.

“Yeah, we get transportation but … the actual stipends we have for food and rent has not changed and that’s what inflation has been hitting,” he said.

Pitt raised stipends for graduate student workers by 4% last fall, with minimum stipends for graduate student researchers and assistants brought to $10,000 a term.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an overall 2.6% increase in consumer prices during the past year.

Health coverage decision spurs action

The bureau also reported a 3.8% increase in costs for medical care services.

Last August, Pitt announced changes to the health care plan for grad students — though Healy said it was not so much an announcement as “a link in an email.” The changes involved combining the grad and undergrad health plans to “provide the University with greater leverage in negotiating lower rates for all student health plans in the future,” according to an email sent by Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor Joseph McCarthy.

Without advance notice, deductibles were added and co-pays increased, leaving many students upset. McCarthy recognized this in his email, stating he deeply regretted the “significant anxiety and confusion” caused by the university’s actions.

“My offer letter literally said, ‘Come to Pitt, we have great health care.’ Two weeks before class started, they slashed it,” Fawcett said.

The change especially hit students with families, disabled students, transgender students and international students hard, according to Healy and Fawcett.

Three months after the health care changes were announced, graduate student organizers kicked off a card campaign for union representation.

Next up: bargaining
Before the election, Healy already had their sights set on bargaining because that’s when, they said, “we actually win.” They acknowledged there’s a big question mark surrounding the health care issue.

Healy said they and other student organizers have talked to grad students at other universities, including Harvard, who creatively worked around grievances they had with health plan coverage during negotiations. Healy said Pitt grad students just want the old plan back.

“I keep being told by administrators that that is completely impossible, but I also don’t think that there is currently anything meaningfully pushing them to see if it’s possible,” Healy said.

Healy said that even as student attitudes have shifted, so has the administration’s. This time, the vote brought less pushback from the university compared to 2019.

In January, more than 200 students gathered to deliver a letter to Pitt Chancellor Joan Gabel with the results of the card campaign, in the hopes she’d voluntarily recognize the union. She was out of office, so they filed for a representative election to the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board [PLRB] the next day. Gabel said then that she respected the students’ “agency and self-determination,” and looked forward to furthering their “important engagement in the days ahead.”

Student organizers said the university failed to deliver a list of eligible employees to the PLRB for the next seven months.

Eaton said administration at universities “tend to overestimate how hard it’s going to be and what a disaster it’s going to be if the students are organized.” She said it’s not a “completely irrational” standpoint given how contentious campuses have been recently, but her research has shown that grad student worker unions don’t infringe on academic freedom or degrade faculty-student relationships.

Healy said the vote ends years of debate about whether Pitt grad students who work should be treated as employees. “There is no mistake, we are employees, treat this relationship as a workplace — and a good one.”

Maddy Franklin reports on higher ed for PublicSource, in partnership with Open Campus, and can be reached at madison@publicsource.org.