Doctoral students end Dartmouth strike with better pay and benefits

By Arnie Alpert, Active with the Activists

Arnie Alpert was a community organizer/educator in NH social justice and peace movements for decades. As of 2020, he is officially retired but remains active in the activist world, writing about past and present social movements.

HANOVER – After a 59-day strike, the Dartmouth College graduates union has approved its first collective bargaining agreement, winning a significant wage increase, expanded benefits and protection from unfair treatment.

The Graduate Organized Laborers at Dartmouth, GOLD, was formed in the fall of 2021. A year later, they joined the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and became known as GOLD-UE. Negotiations began after GOLD-UE won an NLRB-supervised election in 2023. Frustrated by the lack of progress after months at the bargaining table, the union went on strike on May 1.

Negotiations continued during the strike until June 20, when the college submitted a “slightly revised package offer that would reach an agreement with GOLD-UE while maintaining Dartmouth’s core positions,” including a clause prohibiting the union from striking during the term of the contract. Union negotiators brought the proposal back to members, who, with the support of their bargaining committee, agreed to put it to a ratification vote.

In addition to a 17.5% raise in the first year of the three-year contract, bringing their annual salary to $47,000, annual compensation in the second and third years will increase with the cost of living. Genevieve Goebel, a member of the union’s bargaining committee, said Dartmouth will be the first graduate union to impose salary increases tied to the consumer price index. “No other graduate contracts, including those negotiated by UE, include a direct cost-of-living adjustment like ours,” the school said in a statement.

The college did not agree to retroactive pay for the period of the student assistants’ strike. The union was also unable to gain access to the college’s daycare, but it did win a substantial daycare support fund and a promise of access to the daycare at an unspecified date.

Last week, the union held “town halls” to inform members of contract details and held an online vote open to anyone who had paid their dues. Voting closed at 5 p.m. Friday, after which the union informed members by email that the contract had been ratified. The union did not disclose the actual vote result, only that it was “far too few,” according to Royce Brown, a UE employee.

Genevieve Goebel, a soil chemist in the fifth year of her Ph.D. program, led the final town hall meeting Friday afternoon and spent over an hour going over the terms of the contract, detailing section by section provisions on compensation, time off, medical and dental care, grievance procedures, anti-discrimination protections, health and safety, intellectual property, assignment of teaching duties, the needs of international students, the union security clause and more.

Some measures are relatively simple, like the right to display union signs on campus posters. Other provisions could prove complex, such as “common funds” that can be used for medical expenses. I don’t know if anyone prints out a union contract anymore, but this one would fill many pages.

In some areas the union did not achieve its goals, such as accepting the no-strike clause and a subsidy that was less than the amount it considered necessary to cover local living costs. However, in most areas they were able to achieve improvements.

When I first interviewed Goebel, she told me that talks about discrimination and unfair treatment had stalled. “Right now, we’re hitting a wall with the college,” she said at a rally before a round of negotiations. Eight months later, the ratified contract includes a grievance process with binding arbitration, protections against overwork and unreasonable work hours, and the ability to appeal decisions made by the college’s Title IX office, which handles complaints of discrimination. “I’m really proud that we won that,” she said, calling the appeals process “a dramatic improvement over what was before.”

Ankita Sarkar, a fourth-year Indian PhD student in computer science, said the contract included “better support for the costs of studying abroad,” such as payment of visa fees and mandatory leave to complete immigration matters. She also said the college is now required to “provide the documentation in a timely manner” so students can meet government requirements. She is disappointed with the “no-strike clause” but glad the dental treatment was paid for.

Dylan Barbagallo, a materials science graduate student, said he sees the wage dispute as being about “housing, housing, housing, housing,” which is no surprise in the state’s highest-rent district. Although the union failed to secure increases tied specifically to housing costs, he said, “I think we’ve solved the problem in more circuitous ways by raising wages and reducing other burdens on students.” Barbagallo voted “yes” to ratify the contract, saying the two-month strike has fostered “a sense of solidarity” among students who may be working in relatively isolated conditions.

Goebel said, “More than anything else in the contract itself, I’m proud that we stood our ground and went on strike.” With the strike, the Dartmouth union showed that “we won’t let anything stop us from demanding the things we need to get through this.”

Goebel said the union has benefited from the experiences of other universities, where unionization among student workers has gained momentum in recent years. “I think we’re in a really unique time for organizing in higher education,” she said, noting that the Dartmouth contract “follows a pretty rapid succession of other contracts that have been recently finalized.” The performance provisions of the recent agreement at Johns Hopkins University, she said, served as a model that inspired the Dartmouth union to demand more than the college was initially willing to offer.

In the end, “the strike showed that we were all willing to make some pretty big sacrifices. For many graduate students, a strike is basically putting the work they really care about on hold,” she said. “Many of us came to graduate school because we have a real passion for our field and a curiosity. It’s almost like an itch that needs to be scratched. But in this wage dispute, we showed each other through the strike that we are willing to put such passions aside for a greater passion that benefits everyone and leaves no one behind.”

Now Goebel can return to her research sites at the Hubbard Brook Experiment Station in the White Mountains and in Corinth, Vermont, where she studies how changes in winter weather in northern New England affect soil. But she will remain active in the union, which must now adopt a constitution, elect officers and administrators, and instruct new graduate students on living and working on an organized campus.

She will leave when the contract expires at the end of June 2027, but she is confident the union will have new leadership by then. “We have a lot of people in the first year of their five-year program, so they will certainly still be there when the next wage battle comes. And they were able to essentially accompany the bargaining committee that was just dissolved. So they will be really well prepared.”