[wasabi991011]

> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union

Is this really true for the US? There's a grad student union which represents me where I'm at (non-US), was not aware this was so rare.

[ijk]

It's not. In the US, public university graduate student unions started in the 1970s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio...

Which is not to say that conditions in graduate schools (or academia as a whole) are great. But the unionization process is entangled in the legal framework around unions in the United States.

[krastanov]

It is recent and still uncommon that private universities have a grad student union. The US also has many great public universities that have had grad student unions since forever

[mswphd]

it was illegal for private schools to have grad student unions until ~2016, as (private) graduate students were not classified as employees.

https://www.aaup.org/brief/columbia-university-364-nlrb-no-9...

[ijk]

Yeah, private universities being unionized is more recent.

[DaSHacka]

My university apparently doesn't have one either, just a "graduate student government"