We Are Coalition of Research Employees at UMass Chan – UAW

We are graduate student and postdoc workers at UMass Chan who are forming a union to improve the academic worker experience at UMass and increase our voice locally and nationally.

Our work is essential to the world-class research conducted at UMass Chan, but many of us still struggle to afford housing and childcare in Worcester, lack secure rights in the workplace, and face increasing uncertainty about our futures given the current precarious nature of science funding and unstable regulation of visas and work authorization.

We join a growing national movement of academic workers forming unions with the UAW to improve our lives and our work. UAW academic workers across the country have made a difference advocating for science research funding, fair visa and immigration policies, and better working conditions in all academic institutions.

We have already seen the power of organized postdoctoral and student workers at major research institutions to dramatically improve their working conditions through unionization with United Auto Workers, including right here in Worcester with student workers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where graduate workers recently won their first contract, and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where workers organized two of the first graduate worker and postdoc unions in the country. Postdocs and graduate student workers at many other institutions have also formed new unions with the UAW in recent years and won life-changing improvements to their working conditions. By building on their experience we can continue to raise standards for researcher working conditions here in Worcester and across the country.

Hear from some colleagues about why they support the union for postdoc and graduate workers at UMass Chan.