After a nearly year-long negotiation, graduate students at Johns Hopkins University are working under their first union contract — which members ratified last week.
The Teachers and Researchers United group staged protests and signed strike pledges in recent months to push university leaders towards adopting their demands. Both parties reached a tentative agreement on March 29, which union members adopted last Thursday by a 99.5% vote.
“Our asks were really ambitious at the table, but we ended up achieving a contract that everybody felt really well represented by and they were just happy to vote yes for,” said Jayati Sharma, a member of the union’s bargaining committee and a PhD student in epidemiology. “We won more than we thought we could achieve.”
The union, which currently represents more than 3,200 student members, formed in 2023, and has been negotiating its first contract since last May. Johns Hopkins students join a growing wave of graduate unions popping up nationwide.
“We are enormously grateful to the faculty and divisional representatives from across the university who contributed their time, input, and expertise to this effort, as well as to the PhD student workers and union members on the TRU-UE bargaining team who engaged so constructively throughout the bargaining process,” a university spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Sharma said the bargaining committee was at the table with leaders until 8:45 p.m. on March 28. But the end result was worth it, she said.
“There are so many wins, that it is hard to remember them all,” she said.
Sharma said the headliner win is an increase in yearly stipend pay to $47,000 from an average of $33,000, which varies wildly between departments. Graduate workers will start receiving that increased wage on July 1.
The new contract also includes many benefits that union leaders say are “historic firsts” for graduate student unions — like financial support for visa fees, the right to protest without being met by force, and free transit passes in D.C. and Baltimore.
“Hopkins University doesn't really have a great transit system for students and employees,” Sharma said. “So we proposed a simple measure that would rectify that, while also investing resources into the city that we all call home.”
Emily Hoppe, a PhD student in the school of nursing, applauded the union’s wins for parents and caregivers — like up to 12 weeks of paid leave for birthing parents, subsidies for children or adult dependents and a health insurance plan that covers spouses and dependents.
“It just really makes it possible for parents and caregivers to come to the program,” Hoppe said. “If I could have had this with my own child at my previous workplace, it would have made my life much better.”
Andrew Eneim, a biophysics PhD student, has been involved in the union’s organizing efforts for the past four years. He said the union’s commitment to solidarity translated directly to these first-time wins.
“The reason they're historic is because they don't always affect everybody equally,” he said. “And so sometimes that gets lost in the shuffle of trying to achieve some goals. I feel really proud of our members for being willing to fight for things that may not directly affect them.”
Eneim says the work is far from over. Now, the union has to focus on enforcing the new contract — and cementing its own structure by electing leaders.
“I think it's hard to imagine if we kept fighting how much more we could have gotten,” he said. “But that's what the next contract fight is for.”
Hoppe said it’s all about making the contract “mean something more than just the words on the paper.”
“This is not just going to make all of the things that members had concerns about disappear,” she said. “We had to fight hard for the contract that we won. And we're probably going to have to fight for some of the aspects of its enforcement as well.”
