A growing majority of graduate employees support the demand for a more democratic workplace at Boston College. Graduate employees play a critical role in maintaining BC as a world-class research and teaching university. Without collective bargaining, we have experienced precarious funding, disappearing medical coverage, late paychecks, increasing and inconsistent teaching loads, poor support for graduate students with children, job and wage insecurity, and a lack of transparency in administrative policies that stems from our labor not being recognized as work. With a union contract, we would have a voice in our benefits and working conditions, and Boston College would need negotiate with us over our terms and conditions of employment. When we negotiate with the Boston College administration, we will live more securely and improve the quality of our research and teaching.

Graduate employees from across Boston College formed this union in order to improve our working conditions and to make the university a better and more accessible institution for teaching, research, and learning. Like tens of thousands of graduate employees at more than 60 university campuses across the US, we deserve the voice and respect we gain through collective bargaining. Collective bargaining means more rights and more power to shape our lives at Boston College. Collectively we have more power to negotiate with Boston College than we have as individuals. No one will pay any dues or fees until graduate employees have democratically approved a contract with Boston College.

Without a union and collective bargaining:

• Boston College unilaterally determines our working conditions and can change them at any time without our consent.

With a union:

• We elect a bargaining committee that gathers input from graduate employees across the University.
• That bargaining committee negotiates a contract on equal footing with Boston College.
• That contract is approved democratically, through a vote by graduate employees at BC.
• That contract determines our terms and conditions of employment and is binding and enforceable, usually through appeal to a neutral arbitrator.

“I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field.”

-Albert Einstein, on why he joined the faculty union at Princeton as a charter member.