[saidajigumi]

Funny enough, when I was in grad school, the graduate student employees formed a union. In a sort-of-parallel to your narrative, my department, Computer Science, had pretty good support for its grad employees. But many other departments were highly exploitative – splitting hiring lines that should have gone to a single student across three or four.. meaning that none of the recipients got a living wage but each still had a full workload. These departments were effectively trying to create an indentured servant class.

The union ended a whole list of bad practices virtually immediately. Even better, they negotiated us into the same benefits (healthcare, etc.) package that faculty received, which was a significant bump up even for students in the better departments like mine.

None of this would have been possible had the employees not been able to organize to realize their power.