For IU Ph.D. student Katie Shy, it’s getting harder and harder to find people on IU’s campus who haven’t heard of the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition. 

“It’s been really fun to like, dig them out.” Shy said, “Find out do I need to stand out front of the math building? Is it the physics building where they’re all hiding, all these people that haven’t heard from us yet?”

For Shy, who started devoting time to the coalition’s efforts on a regular basis this year, the pace has picked up and there’s so much momentum on campus.

“There’s a very tangible, like, collaborative goal.” Shy said.

When talking to graduate students about desired changes, Shy said, the most common thing you hear is financial. 

“The first plank of our platform is to end the fees,” Shy said. “And a lot of grad students when they hear that, that’s all they need to hear.” 

For the 2021-2022 school year, all students taking more than 6.1 hours of credit at IU Bloomington have to pay a combined mandatory fee of $710.23 per semester according to the Student Central Website.

International students are also required to pay an International Student Fee, which students from the United States are not required to pay according to the Office of International Services website.

For the 2021-2022 school year, the international student fee is $357 according to Student Central. The international student fee for continuing students who were enrolled in their current degree program prior to fall 19 is $212.24 according to Student Central.

According to the website, the International fee assists in supplementing the other sources of revenue IU relies on to fund the programs, services, and infrastructure that provide essential support for international students.

Graduate workers, IU Ph.D. student Cole Nelson said, also want increased pay.

For the 2018-2019 graduate stipends and instructional student academic appointment allotments by program within division, Arts and Humanities and Social Science and History programs offer the lowest stipends which were last increased in 2013-2014. Natural and Mathematical Sciences programs offer higher stipends and, excluding biology, were last increased in 2016-2017 according to the College of Arts and Sciences Task Force on Graduate Student Funding final report. 

In May, graduate workers voted to end the fee strike, which took place during spring of 2021, and begin organizing a union at a Coalition town hall according to their website.

The coalition engaged the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, UE, a democratic national union that, according to their website, represents some 35,000 workers in a variety of manufacturing, public sector and private-service sector jobs. 

The coalition plans to use IU’s HR-12-20 policy, Conditions for Cooperation Between Employee Organizations and the Administration of IU, to form a union. 

Per IU’s policy, an employee organization will be recognized as the exclusive representative of the staff employees or an appropriate staff unit by administrative officials when the organization is eligible for exclusive recognition and has been selected by a majority of the Staff employees in the appropriate staff unit as their representative.

An election will only be held, per IU’s policy, when a petition indicating that at least 30% of employees within the appropriate staff unit support an election has been received and that a prior election concerning exclusive representation hasn’t been held in the 12 months before the petition was received.

According to the union FAQ page on their website, the coalition needs to sign a majority of graduate workers up on union membership cards. When the coalition has a majority, they will deliver the cards to the IU Administration and a Yes or No vote for unionization, where all graduate workers can vote, will be held.

“The process we’re putting in place is we’re trying to gather signatures from as many graduate workers as we possibly can,” Nelson said “We’re shooting for a majority, at the very least a simple majority, but we’re shooting for a super majority of graduate workers, signing union cards to indicate to the university that they want a union.”

The coalition, Nelson said, is well over 1000 signatures and has been going around campus, into classrooms, offices and labs talking with graduate workers about the unionization process, union benefits and asking them to sign up on union cards.

For Shy, approaching fellow graduate students on a day to day and saying we’re putting time in to make all our lives better has been so meaningful.

“Obviously I’m hoping we’ll have the vote to form the union on campus soon,” Shy said. “But I’m hoping that just I’ll keep having the opportunity to have these conversations on a regular basis.”