Sources of Strength in North Carolina's Graduate Student Unions

This study compared sources of strength of public and private graduate student unions in North Carolina universities. Using Marxist theoretical framework that describes unionized workers as products of their material conditions, I looked at access to collective bargaining (an external source of strength) as a mechanism of legal conditions in North Carolina. Private university unions in North Carolina have access to collective bargaining, whereas public university unions do not, so I analyzed the ways that graduate unions have been able to accumulate internal and external strength given their differences in legal conditions. After interviewing members of graduate student unions at one public university (UNC-Chapel Hill) and one private university (Duke University), I found that the private university union had more external strength, which was supported by the legal conditions that allow them to engage in collective bargaining. Meanwhile, the public university union's strength was primarily internal, with sources of power coming mostly from its members themselves.