US
Emory Ph.D. Student Workers Unionize, Join Organizing Wave



By Ryan Quinn


Emory University Ph.D. student workers have voted to unionize, the National Labor Relations Board announced Tuesday.

The vote was 909 to 73, the agency said. Emory’s provost, Ravi V. Bellamkonda, sent Ph.D. students a memo Tuesday saying the university “respects the outcome of the vote, and we are committed to bargaining in good faith with the Union as your representative consistent with our mission, vision and values.”

He said about 60 percent of eligible Ph.D. students voted.

The new union is called SEIU Workers United Southern Region Local 29, and it says it will represent all Ph.D. student workers there. “Over 7 years of effort have finally paid off, and we have joined together to say yes to a union!” the union said on its website.

This fall, Duke University became the first private university south of Washington, D.C., to have a certified graduate worker union, according to William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.

The new union at Emory, a private university in Atlanta, will now join Duke’s as part of the national wave of grad worker organizing.