Campaign Info

1.1 What is bargaining?

Bargaining is the process by which a union negotiates a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with their employer, usually to establish and enshrine protections, benefits, and working conditions for the employees who are members of the bargaining unit of the union in question. For us at MIT, that means all RAs, TAs, and IGs at MIT as covered by the MIT-GSU CBA. Among the key priorities we bargain are (1) Protections for All Workers; (2) Fair Compensation and Benefits; (3) Secure Rights and Appointments. You can read about these in detail here.

Our last contract expired May 31st, 2026, and we started bargaining our second contract on April 24, 2026. You can follow our bargaining process through MIT-GSU communicated emails and the bargaining tracker.

1.2 Can we lose what we won in the first contract?

Absolutely yes. The UE has a long-standing policy of “no concessions” in contract negotiations, meaning we will not agree to give up the things we’ve previously won. We start from the baseline of our current contract and negotiate for better. Unfortunately, MIT admin has given a series of proposals demanding that we surrender key rights and benefits. They’ve even proposed taking away our union shop, which is the source of our power to win and enforce good union contracts. This is why it is important that we not only organize around new benefits and protections but also around those that we already have.

1.3 What happens now that we are working without a contract?

Our first contract expired on May 31st. While we’re working without a contract, MIT is legally required to maintain the status quo. That means they can’t cut our pay or benefits and can’t make changes to our working conditions (e.g., new work rules). We also regain the right to strike, which we can do to secure a fair contract and/or to demand resolution of grievances that arise after contract expiration. 

1.4 Are we losing money since we didn’t get a June 1st raise?

No! When union contracts expire without a successor agreement in place, the standard practice is to give raises retroactively. We would insist that our stipend increase be retroactive to June 1st as part of settling the agreement.

MIT admin may try to fight us on this by using a sense of loss to motivate us to agree to an unacceptable deal. Our goal is to quickly reach a fair contract with meaningful stipend increases. It’s up to MIT admin to prioritize grad workers so that we can get the raises we need as soon as possible. We won’t be pushed into the false choice of accepting less than we deserve to get something right away.

2.1 What are we attempting to get out of contract negotiations?

We want to protect our current rights and benefits won by grads in our first contract and secure further improvements that build on that foundation. Because this is only our second contract, it’s normal and expected that we still have significant unmet needs. Our demands include:

• Fellows Inclusion

• Academic Just Cause (Due Process)

• Protections for International Grads

• Stipend Increases

• More Flexible Vacation Policy

• Funding Guarantees

The complete list of our bargaining priorities can be found here.

2.2 How do we choose our bargaining priorities?

MIT GSU is committed to member-run unionism and rank-and-file democratic processes. In Fall 2025, we ran our Bargaining Survey where nearly 1800 workers across campus shared what protections and benefits they wanted in our second contract. Then, our bargaining committee did a comprehensive review of the survey results and crafted bargaining priorities that tackle key issues affecting graduate workers across campus. These priorities were then voted on and approved by union membership at our March General Membership Meeting. You can read more about our bargaining priorities here as well as track the articles and exact language we are proposing at the table in our bargaining tracker.

3.1 What is MIT admin attempting to get out of contract negotiations?

Admin is attempting to break our union. Period. They seek to accomplish this through two pathways.

First, concessionary contract proposals. Most egregiously, they seek to curtail our power as an effective, representative union by taking away the union shop we were prepared to strike for in 2023. They’ve also given proposals to:

• make our grievance procedure ineffective; 

• remove requirements to continually notify members of their rights to union representation and replace it with a one-time letter; 

• invalidate portions of our union contract if they conflict with the whims of the Trump administration; and

• eliminate the contract protection that prevents MIT from cutting our health insurance benefits. 

Second, there are the 4 Ds: Delay, Distract, Divide, and Demoralize. These are classic union-busting tactics.

Delay: They delayed the start of negotiations by over a month and have agreed to precious little bargaining time.

Distract: They are pushing the narrative that the Institute lacks the money or capacity to meet graduate workers’ needs.

Divide: They are trying to split workers apart by giving fellows a meager 3% raise, while also framing an open shop as “freedom to decide.” In reality, an open shop would only make our union weaker, less effective, and under-resourced for future generations of graduate students.

Demoralize: They are ignoring key issues at the bargaining table and acting as though our collective action is not having an impact. Ultimately, MIT will not move until the pressure becomes too great to ignore.

Now that our contract has expired, admin’s hope is that they can use these tactics to convince workers that we have no choice but to accept a second contract that is worse than our first. 

4.1 Why do we need a union shop?

A union shop ensures that all workers covered by our contract equally contribute to and benefit from the protections and power of our union. Union shop is fundamental to how we build collective power and defend our rights as graduate student workers. Under the open shop structure that MIT proposed, our collective power becomes diluted and diverted towards member recruitment while the burden of contract enforcement is concentrated on a small fraction of dues-paying members. It is an undemocratic union-busting tactic aimed at weakening our union and our ability to protect our rights as MIT workers. For more information see here: https://mitgsu.org/union-shop

Agreeing to a contract without a union shop provision would be no better than signing a napkin and preserving our union shop is key to ensuring that our contract works for us and generations of graduate workers to come.

4.2 What is academic just cause?

Just cause protections mean that any discipline taken against an employee must be fair and reasonable. Just cause is a standard that most union workers in other industries can take for granted. With just cause, punishments can’t be arbitrary, can’t be different for workers who commit the same offense, and can’t be given without due process and a fair investigation. Article 6, Discipline & Discharge, of our union contract grants us just cause for discipline that arises out of our employment.

Our employment is completely conditioned on having student status at MIT and it is impossible to practically differentiate the work we do from the academic tasks we do. Academia is an industry with a notoriously fuzzy border between “research-related work” and “academic matters” such as completing coursework and qualifying exams. For example, students across departments are often forced to leave their programs and lose their RA appointments on the basis of “having failed their academic requirements” without much transparency or due process. Personal vendettas and departmental politics are cloaked as “academic” matters in order to exploit contractual loopholes. That is why it is paramount that we fight for academic due process protections. These protections will ensure that for anyone to be disciplined on academic grounds, the group bringing such discipline (e.g. a PI, a department, MIT administration, the Committee on Discipline, etc.) must show that there was a clear academic standard and that there is evidence such a standard was not met. Furthermore, similar protections already exist for graduate workers at other institutions, such as Cornell. 

4.2.1 What does this mean for academic standards and faculty decisions over grades?

Applying just cause to academic decisions would not lower academic standards or undermine faculty authority to evaluate academic performance. For instance, an arbitrator would not be tasked with second-guessing grades. With few exceptions, an arbitrator would be focused solely on evaluating the consequences of poor academic performance (e.g., removal from your program and your employment), not on adjudicating the fact of poor academic performance itself. Were expectations clear and consistent with program requirements? Were the consequences of failure clear? Are all grads in the department held to the same standards/given the same consequences? Unless the poor performance was so egregious as to indicate no hope of improvement, was the grad worker given at least one opportunity to improve? If the answer to any of the foregoing questions is "no," then the arbitrator might order a remedy to correct the consequences (e.g., reinstatement with back pay) without needing to alter a grade and even without needing to look at academic work product.

4.3 Why should fellows join our union and be part of our contract?

We have the most strength and leverage to win improvements and protect each other when we are united as an entire graduate workforce. Despite Fellows often performing the same duties and having similar work expectations as RAs and TAs, MIT is denying Fellows union recognition as a tactic to weaken the power of our union. 

Furthermore, Fellows are currently not covered by the portions of our contract that protect workers from discrimination and harassment and that grant union representation in the disciplinary process, putting Fellows in a more precarious position as a second tier of graduate workers. 

While Fellows have traditionally enjoyed many of the same financial contract benefits as bargaining unit members, this is not legally guaranteed by a binding contract and MIT has recently exercised the ability to arbitrarily change these benefits for Fellows. For example, the Biological Engineering and Chemical Engineering departments both removed pay bonuses given to fellows without warning (see the Fellows Inclusion Petition for other examples). 

If Fellows were covered under the contract, MIT would have to extend the same benefits protections to all graduate workers and would not be able to arbitrarily change Fellows’ benefits or pay without first negotiating with our union.

4.4 Would inclusion under the union contract limit international fellows to only working 20h/week or create visa complications?

No. MIT admin is creating a distorted hypothetical outcome in an effort to frighten international graduate workers from getting involved to improve our working conditions.

International grads with an RA or TA appointment don’t face visa issues related to the 20h/week limit. We see no reason why it would be any different for fellows to be granted the protections and certainty of a union contract. International fellows under contract at grad unions at Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, UPenn, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCLA have not experienced the problems that MIT alleges would occur if fellows were part of our bargaining unit and union contract.

4.5 What does the 3% raise given to only fellows on June 1st mean?

This is exactly why fellows should be included in our bargaining unit. With fellows excluded, MIT is taking the opportunity to try to pit workers against other workers and our union. MIT admin hopes that this meager 3% increase – which is an effective wage cut after factoring in an expected 6% inflation this quarter – will make union members believe 3% is all we can hope to achieve.  Admin also hopes that fellows will be bought off by this raise and see that they don’t need a union. MIT admin knows, however, that fellows inclusion is popular: over 1600 workers signed onto the fellows petition we delivered on the first day of bargaining.

To be very clear: despite MIT’s disingenuous claims that wages must be frozen because they are a subject of collective bargaining, nothing is stopping MIT from granting union members a 3% (or more!) raise right now while negotiations continue. Our bargaining committee put forward a proposal on June 1st that would permit them to do exactly this.While our bargaining committee was clear that we believe 3% is insufficient and significantly less than MIT can actually afford, our committee also stated that we’d accept 3% while we continued negotiations to reach agreement on a new contract. MIT refused our proposal which would do exactly this.

4.6 How do funding cuts affect our contract negotiations?

Higher education everywhere is under attack, and cuts to research funding are a core component of that attack. However, at the same time, MIT has a 27+ billion dollar endowment and a 5+ billion dollar operating budget. 

The minimum PhD stipend only covers 75% of the living wage in Boston. Why should the most crucial yet underpaid members of our academic community in one of the most expensive American cities bear the brunt of the funding cuts? MIT (and its endowment) cannot exist without our work, and the value of our work should be reflected in our pay. 

A 3% raise for every (~5000) grad worker would add approximately $7.7M / year to MIT’s expenses. To put this in perspective, MIT’s 2025 operating budget (money spent by the Institute) was $5.1B; $7.7M represents just 0.15% of all the money spent in 2025. It is also 0.02% of the existing endowment. We believe that the costs of fair raises are extremely small in comparison to the resources available at MIT to meet our needs.

MIT has underpaid its graduate workers – most of whom are rent-burdened or severely rent-burdened – for far too long, and now is the time to fight for compensation that reflects the value of our work, regardless of funding cuts.

5.1 What is a strike?

A strike is our final tool to win a union contract that meets our needs with fair raises, benefits, and workplace protections.

A strike means graduate workers stop performing all work for MIT — research, teaching, administrative, “academic,” or otherwise — because MIT has continued to deny us workplace protections and benefits. The decision to strike is a democratic process, and before any strike we would hold a strike authorization vote in which all union members have the right to participate.

5.2 What would we strike for?

We would strike to protect our union’s ability to continue as a meaningful, functional organization and to secure as many of our core demands as possible. Pending a strike authorization vote and the future status of negotiations, we would anticipate preparing to go on strike for the following demands identified from the bargaining survey:

• Protecting our Union Shop

• Protections for International Grads

• Stipend Increases

• Fellows Inclusion

• Academic Just Cause (Due Process)

• Funding Guarantees

MIT has the ability to address these demands at any time to avert a strike.

5.3 Why is striking necessary? Is striking inevitable?

In a negotiation, the ability to secure concessions depends on leverage. In the case of a labor union, that leverage takes a simple form: agree to our demands, or we go on strike.

We would only strike because MIT has refused to offer graduate workers a fair union contract. MIT has dragged their feet at the bargaining table for months; if they continue to stall, a strike is our last resort and our best tool to get the Institute to move on key issues within a reasonable time frame. 

A strike is not inevitable; MIT can end the build-up and execution of a strike at any time by offering us a fair agreement.

5.4 Where does our leverage over the Institute come from?

Our research labor earns MIT millions of dollars in grant funding per year; our teaching labor educates thousands of tuition-paying students; and our continued work earns the Institute credibility and prestige on an international scale. Striking puts MIT’s economic bottom line and reputation at risk and pressures them to work towards a fair contract at the negotiating table.

6.1 Who would be going on strike?

All graduate students who provide research and instructional services to the Institute.

6.2 What is the process for authorizing a strike?

First, a majority of graduate workers would sign a “strike pledge” indicating their willingness to go on strike. This sends a message that we are ready to do what it takes to win a strong contract. If the Institute continues to stall negotiations, we will hold a membership-wide Strike Authorization Vote (SAV). After the SAV passes, the bargaining committee will determine whether and when to begin the strike based on the state of play of negotiations.

6.3 Who will vote in the Strike Authorization Vote (SAV)?

All card signing members regardless of bargaining unit position including fellows, masters students, etc.

6.4 How will the strike end?

Our membership decides when to stop striking through a contract ratification vote, which occurs when our union’s bargaining committee decides that the set of proposals agreed to at the table is substantial enough (a “tentative agreement”) for a membership vote. Bargaining will continue throughout a strike until our bargaining committee reaches such a tentative agreement with MIT on the full contract and recommends it to membership for a ratification vote. The voting options will be to accept the contract or continue the strike. A majority membership vote to accept and ratify the contract would end the strike. 

Analogous to the Strike Authorization Vote, all dues-paying members of our union would be eligible to participate in this ratification. 

6.5 How long will the strike last?

As long as it takes to settle a fair contract. Once we go out, we should be prepared to stay out until our demands are met and a new contract is ratified by a membership vote.

Our ultimate goal is to settle a fair agreement as quickly as possible, which will be facilitated by a strike that is as large and impactful as possible. The bigger the crisis we are able to create, the faster MIT admin will have to move to resolve the strike with a better offer.

Ultimately, members will be in control of how long a strike goes because members will democratically decide when to end the strike. 

7.1 What work should I withhold?

Any and all duties related to your teaching or research work. To be most successful as bargaining leverage, our strike must be broad, complete, and visible. Specific strike guidelines will be rolled out as a strike gets closer, and targeted strike plans will be developed by each department to take into account any unique circumstances that need to be addressed.

If you have any questions or concerns, please talk to a department organizer or bargaining committee representative to discuss further what striking in your department/area means.

7.2 What can I do to support contract negotiations prior to a strike?

Prior to a strike, you should continue your regular work but participate in all escalation actions such as the strike pledge and the strike authorization vote. These activities tell MIT that we are not happy with their current proposals and want MIT to promptly meet our demands to avert the crisis of a strike. 

Additionally, preparation for strike is best done togetherwith your coworkers; so please come to an organizer training and talk to your coworkers about going on strike with you.

7.3 What can I do to support contract negotiations during a strike?

During a strike you should be present for shifts at a pre-scheduled picket line outside your worksite. You can also support the strike with organizing work, contributing to strike coordination, supporting mutual-aid projects, or talking/calling/texting your coworkers asking them to join a picket line. Our leverage during the strike is based on how complete and visible our strike activities are: maximal leverage will decrease the amount of time needed to settle our contract and resolve our strike.

• Bargaining and Grievance Committee (BGC): Group of 11 elected graduate workers who represent the needs and demands of all members when writing our contract proposals and meeting with members of MIT administration to negotiate our contract. 

• Contract Action Team (CAT):a group of grad workers who volunteer to help keep the general membership informed throughout the bargaining process, mobilize their coworkers to take action to put pressure on the MIT administration around our bargaining priorities.

• Tentative Agreement (TA): a written agreement between the employer and BGC that must be voted on by MIT GSU-UE Local 256 members before it becomes a legally binding contract.

• Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA)/Contract: a written agreement between the employer and the employees, that is voted upon and ratified by all MIT GSU-UE Local 256 members, that details the terms and benefits of employment in a clear and legally-binding way.

• MIT GSU-UE Local 256: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Graduate Student Union, Local 256 of United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America.

What is the CAT?

The CAT is the Contract Action Team made up of graduate workers across campus. It takes all of us graduate students working together to win a contract we deserve. In every department, lab, cohort, building, and teaching team, grad students need to come together to: 

1. Shape our bargaining priorities 

2. Take action to improve our workplace rights 

In order to build the mass, supermajority participation we need, grad students across MIT are joining the CAT to make sure their coworkers stay informed and ready to win a strong contract! 

What do CAT members do?

Members of the Contract Action Team are committing to:

• Visibly participate: wear union gear, attend important collective actions, and be a visible union supporter.

• Keep others informed: talk to coworkers about bargaining, share updates from our Bargaining Committee, answer questions, and address concerns.

• Mobilize coworkers: make sure colleagues 

  • Know the stakes of this contract fight, 

  • Are participating in shaping and ratifying bargaining priorities, and 

  • Are standing together to put pressure on the MIT administration through rallies and other direct actions — up to and including a strike if justified and necessary.

• Expand the CAT: identify coworkers who can do all of the above in their own lab, cohort, floor, teaching team, or other group of workers, and invite them to join the CAT.

Do I need prior organizing experience to be an effective CAT member?

No! While any prior experience is welcome, all CAT members will be trained and mentored on how to organize our coworkers by existing union stewards!

How do I join the CAT? 

Any grad student can get started on the CAT after signing up here and receiving a short training and onboarding. All stewards are automatically CAT members. You should encourage coworkers to join the CAT who care about improving our working conditions at MIT. The more members of the CAT that we have, the better chances are that we win our collectively decided bargaining priorities.

What’s the time commitment of the CAT?

The most important task of a CAT member is keeping co-workers informed about and bringing them into the contract fight, and that can take however much time you’re able to give. There will also be department-specific CAT meetings (1 hour, weekly), and the occasional All-Hands CAT meeting (1 hour, monthly). Attendance at these meetings is encouraged where possible.