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About
EmoryUnite! is the graduate worker union at Emory University, formed by and for PhD workers who are essential to the university’s teaching, research, and academic excellence. We organize for fair pay, better benefits, and dignified working conditions.
In 2024, over 92% of voting graduate workers chose to unionize. We are now the first union on Emory’s campus and the second graduate worker union to form in a “right-to-work” state.
Why we unionized
Emory University holds an endowment of over $11 billion and received more than $1 billion in research funding in 2024, including $488 million from the NIH. It is one of the wealthiest and most prestigious institutions in the country. Yet for years, the very PhD workers whose labor upheld Emory’s reputation were underpaid, overworked, and overlooked.
We are researchers, educators, mentors, and lab technicians. We write grants, produce research that brought in millions, teach and support students, and perform critical university functions every day. Despite our contributions, we have been forced to live paycheck to paycheck. As rent and living costs rose, our wages failed to keep pace. Decisions that impacted our healthcare, job security, and livelihoods were made without our input. We unionized because we believe that universities should serve the public good, rather than operating like corporations. We believe that decisions affecting workers should be made with workers. And we believe that our labor deserves respect, fair compensation, and security. We therefore organized to claim the power and voice we had always deserved, because we knew our labor was essential and should be valued accordingly.
Importantly, our fight extends beyond Emory’s campus. As part of the broader labor movement, we stand in solidarity with workers across Atlanta, the Southeast, and beyond. We know that real change happens when we unite, organize, and refuse to accept less than we are worth.
We believe in the power of collective action. We believe in a university that invests in the well-being of those who sustain it. And we believe that together, we will win!
To learn about our history, visit this page.
Our Movement
Since forming, we’ve taken bold, collective action. From solidarity campaigns and packed bargaining sessions, to demonstrations that have brought out hundreds of students, workers, and community members together, we’ve made our presence felt. A core group of organizers has led these efforts during our first contract campaign, ensuring our demands stay front and center during contract negotiations.
We are supported by a growing coalition of allies, including undergraduates, faculty, and organizations like the National Lawyers Guild and United Campus Workers of Georgia. Together, we’re building a cross-campus movement for justice.
Why Organizing in the South Matters
Our victories are especially powerful because they occur in the South, a region where union density is historically low, labor laws are intentionally disempowering, and political leadership has long prioritized the interests of corporations and the wealthy over those of working people. From “right-to-work” laws to anti-strike legislation and union-busting tactics, the South has been designed to keep workers divided, disposable, and silenced.
Emory is only the second private university in a right-to-work state where graduate workers have successfully unionized, following Duke. We were able to organize because private-sector workers like us are covered under federal labor laws through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which are hard-won protections by historic workers' movements. In contrast, public-sector workers in Georgia, including those at state universities, are still legally barred from collective bargaining and striking under state law. This legal divide reflects a broader strategy to suppress labor power in the South, particularly among public workers, who are disproportionately Black, brown, and working class.
That makes our wins a national breakthrough, and a direct challenge to the myth that the South is too conservative or hostile for labor organizing. It proves that workers can win here.
It makes our fights in the South about much more than just wages or benefits. In the South, organizing serves as a form of resistance and protection. Not only must we fight to secure basic rights in a region where those rights are often under constant threat, but also retain and preserve what we’ve won, while reclaiming what’s been taken from us. All in all, it's about fighting for a future that the system insists we cannot have.
We understand that our win at Emory only widens the path for struggle. It raises a critical question: if private sector workers in Georgia can organize and bargain, why are public sector workers still denied those same rights? We stand in full solidarity with all workers in the South who continue to organize under hostile conditions, such as the United Campus Workers of Georgia (UCWGA), the Southern Youth Labor Movement (SLYM) and, our sister union, the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW).
Organizing in the South, therefore, requires us to root ourselves in solidarity that extends far beyond the university. That's why we’re proud to be part of a larger network of workers in the SEIU/Workers United Southern Region, a union family made up of airport, hotel, laundry, and service workers, majority of whom are Black, Latino, and immigrants. These workers, who face some of the harshest labor conditions in the country, have stood with us, supported us financially and politically, and embodied the principle that an injury to one is an injury to all!
This cross-sector solidarity is part of a deep, radical tradition in the South. We place our labor struggles and coalition development in the lineage of Southern resistance movements, from the abolitionist struggles and Reconstruction-era organizing, to the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power era, and the multiracial labor uprisings that followed. We stand in the footsteps of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, all of whom understood that racial justice, economic justice, and political liberation are inextricably linked.
Beyond just better wages and health care, we are organizing for control over our labor, our lives, and our institutions. We are organizing against academic repression, against the corporate takeover of education, and against attacks on free speech and public education. We see our fight as part of the broader struggles for immigrant rights, gender and queer liberation, Black liberation, and a free Palestine. We reject the silos that divide our movements.
And that’s the power of this moment. We are reclaiming a Southern tradition that the mainstream narrative often erases: one where the South is far more than just a site of oppression. Indeed, the South is a region where people have always found ways to resist, to survive, to dream and organize for something better.
As W.E.B Du Bois famously put it, "As the South goes, so goes the nation".
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