Democracy Is an Endless Organizing Drive: Learning from the Failure and Future of Graduate Student Organizing at the University of Minnesota : Learning from the Failure and Future of Graduate Student Organizing at the University of Minnesota Michael Brown, Ronda Copher, and Katy Gray Brown

doi:10.4324/9780203465493-14

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Democracy Is an Endless Organizing Drive: Learning from the Failure and Future of Graduate Student Organizing at the University of Minnesota

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ABSTRACT

Beginnings The movement to unionize graduate assistants followed on the heels of two other unionization attempts at the University of Minnesota. In February

of 1997, faculty voted against unionization by a twenty-six-vote margin out of more than thirteen hundred votes cast. The union campaign for faculty was essentially conducted via e-mail, with little outreach, and many felt that had more traditional organizing occurred the outcome would have been different. Five months later, university professional workers voted against unionization 932 to 651. Despite these recent losses, the general attitude on campus continued to be favorable toward unionization. Thus for graduate assistants who were looking to have respect and recognition for their efforts on campus, as one graduate student expressed it, “unionization was sort of in the air at that time.”