More than 50,000 graduate students and other student workers on 51 university campuses nationwide have formed unions since 2022, according to the National Labor Relations Board.

The organizing campaigns have led to some of the biggest union elections in years, with graduate student teachers and researchers and undergraduate housing and dining employees joining the ranks of the Service Employees International Union, the United Auto Workers and other traditionally blue-collar unions. These efforts have not garnered as much attention as organizing drives at Amazon and Starbucks, but they have boosted the ranks of organized labor after decades of losses.

The new unions include more than 3,000 Cornell University student workers joining the United Electrical Workers and 1,400 California Institute of Technology student workers and 4,000 University of Pennsylvania student workers joining the UAW. Higher education workers now account for a quarter of the UAW’s total membership of about 400,000.

Favorable policies at the National Labor Relations Board, which prosecutes labor law violations and decides questions of legal doctrine, have given collegiate union organizing a boost under President Joe Biden, but a GOP-led labor board during a second term for Donald Trump is expected to make union campaigns more difficult.

Huffington Post, Nov. 18