Early Organizing Work
The UT Graduate Workers Union was not founded overnight. Eight years before the union launched, UT-Austin graduate students began organizing in a collective called Underpaid@UT. While the group enjoyed initial success, progress stagnated over the ensuing years. This motivated the launch of UTGWU, and a corresponding fundamental shift in the organizing strategy of UT graduate students — towards the formation of a strike-ready union. In the following, we outline the history of Underpaid@UT.
Origins and Early campaigns
During the fall ‘17 semester, grad students at UT-Austin held a walkout to protest a potential tax on graduate student tuition, marking the beginning of a new wave of organizing at UT. That same year, UT-Austin’s Graduate Assembly created the Graduate Student Labor Committee (GSLC), which surveyed graduate students from across the university. This survey largely emerged because no administrative entity at UT could provide centralized data on graduate student stipends from across the university. The survey results revealed that there were massive inequities in stipend payments by departments, students were suffering under enormous housing cost burdens, and a substantial proportion of grad students were working additional jobs to make ends meet. By December 2018, agitation from graduate students helped push UT-Austin’s administration to create the Graduate Student Education Task Force.
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In the spring of 2019, Underpaid@UT was officially founded. It began as weekly meetings of six to seven graduate students and slowly grew. During its founding semester, Underpaid focused on pressuring university administration to eliminate a discrepancy between the cost of tuition and university payments that caused some graduate student workers to pay up to $1k in tuition per semester. Working in collaboration with the GSLC, we created and disseminated a petition to eliminate this tuition gap, which was signed by thousands of people. On May Day 2019, Underpaid@UT organized a rally and march through campus that drew about 300 graduate student workers and allies. The march ended with the delivery of the petition to administration representatives on the steps of the tower. In the cover letter to the petition, we demanded a response from Provost McInnis and Dean Smith within one week detailing how they plan to close the tuition gap. When we did not receive a response by this deadline, Underpaid@UT covertly organized a “grade-in” in Provost McInnis’s office that began with about 30 graduate student workers and attracted more throughout the day. We occupied her office and spent the day grading to make visible the crucial labor we provide to the university. Within a couple of weeks of this grade-in, we received an initial response. By the Fall semester, we had succeeded in pressuring administration to fully cover the tuition gap for all students employed in 20+ hour appointments. Since then, they have continued to cover the tuition gap. This was a clear win resulting directly from Underpaid organizing and direct action, with lasting impact for graduate students across the University.​
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After winning coverage of the tuition gap, Underpaid@UT switched its focus to increasing student stipends during the 2019-2020 academic year. As part of this new focus, Underpaid@UT helped draft a letter with university faculty that called on UT’s administration to pay grad workers a living wage. The letter got around 400 signatures, but the campaign soon fizzled out after faculty members expressed various concerns about their involvement with our demands. During this same period, the Graduate Student Education Task Force published its recommendations to administration, which articulated the urgent need to raise stipends to competitive levels and otherwise improve graduate student services and experience. The task force included some very strong faculty allies who engaged with Underpaid@UT off the record during the drafting of the final report and incorporated some crucial points that were missing from the document. However, the final framing of their report was ultimately constrained by the Dean’s office.
Organizing During and After the Pandemic
Underpaid@UT’s organizing efforts were disrupted by the pandemic, which shifted our organizational focus to organizing for pandemic protections. Actions that followed included labor-intensive advocacy around the health insurance switch from UT Select to Academic Blue (op-ed in The Nation here), and a protest of Hartzell’s inauguration in Fall 2021 to demand masking requirements that was co-organized with the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU). Organizing efforts continued into 2022, with a town hall in Spring 2022 and a “values retreat” in Summer 2022 to decide future directions and define our values as an organizing collective. Summer 2022 also saw a potential collaboration with the Texas Faculty Association (TFA) in hiring a full-time staff organizer, but this idea was shot down by TSEU.
In the fall of 2022, with the pandemic “over”, we ramped up our efforts on campus in pushing for our core demands: a living wage, cost-of-living adjustments, adequate healthcare, and affordable housing. This took the form of an Underpaid-led cross-campus coalition with dozens of departmental student groups who conducted cost-of-living surveys, which hundreds of students responded to. The results were compiled and delivered to the university provost in December 2022. We originally planned another “grade-in” outside the provost’s office, but administration threatened us with police force and we moved the grade-in across the hall. On the day of the event, the police refused entry to the press. Ultimately, these actions resulted in bad publicity for UT (also see here and here). After months of silence, administration delivered a boilerplate response during the last week of the semester. It failed to meaningfully address any of our demands. We delivered the finalized results at the end of the school year. However, this organizing effort did not translate into increased participation in Underpaid.
The Spring and Summer of 2023 were defined by increased collaboration with TSEU and pushing graduate students toward the union. TSEU hired one of our members for the promised full-time staff organizer position. Underpaid@UT worked with TSEU to collect signatures for a pay raise petition that was used when lobbying state legislators during the legislative session. TSEU also collaborated with House Representative John Bucy to introduce a pay raise bill for all state employees, including university workers. Organizing culminated in “Lobby Day,” where TSEU members from around the state came together for a rally at the Texas Capitol in April (see also here). This organizing and advocacy centered pay raises and pushed back against anti diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) legislation. As expected, state legislators ignored our demands, as did UT president Jay Hartzell.
Transition to UTGWU and Grassroots Organizing
By the Summer of 2023, only a couple of active members remained in Underpaid@UT, and our organizing efforts had stagnated. These issues prompted us to conduct a review of Underpaid@UT’s organizing strategies in the Fall of 2023, which included discussions with various labor activists with particular expertise in the university setting. Overall, we concluded that the stalled progress Underpaid has experienced since 2020 could be explained by an organizational focus on bureaucratic approaches to organizing that did not engage ordinary graduate students.
Over the next two years, Underpaid@UT engaged in various grassroots organizing experiments, including a campaign called COLAlition to organize College of Liberal Arts (COLA) graduate students and win badly need pay increases. However, through these organizing efforts, which included Texas Information Act requests to learn more about the internal structure of COLA, we quickly came to the conclusion that a grassroots organizing strategy in individual colleges alone was not sufficient, and that we must be strike-ready in order to win. On September 10th, 2025, UTGWU was officially launched, and we began work to realize this vision.