by Tessa Barber, University of South Florida Graduate Assistants United (UFF-USF-GAU)
To Be a Florida Grad Worker
To be a graduate student worker in Florida is to live pulled between two identities the state is actively trying to tear apart. As students, we face mounting threats to our academic freedom, our funding, our free speech, and the legitimacy of the very programs in which we study and teach. As workers, we are fighting parallel battles: to enforce our employee status when we are left out of almost every employee policy and platform on campus; to convince people that we “need” or “deserve” a union at all; and to fight back against constant institutional campaigns that squeeze every drop of labor out of us while stripping away the supports that make our labor possible. None of this is unique to Florida. But in a state where the legislature has made union survival itself a battlefield, the urgency is impossible to overstate.
Death by a Thousand (Paper)Cuts
Since 2023, Florida’s public-sector unions have been fighting not just our employers, but the machinery of decertification itself. In 2023, Senate Bill 256 imposed a strict 60% membership-density threshold for public unions to keep our certification, along with heavier reporting and recertification burdens if we are unable to meet this 60% threshold. If our local was under the 60% threshold, we would have to first collect Showing of Interest (SOI) cards from >30% of our unit to trigger a recertification electio, and then have a simple majority of those voting to retain certification.
In 2026, Senate Bill 1296 escalated these requirements; we are still beholden to the 60% threshold, but now our SOI cards expire every 12 months, and we must have a majority of workers in our units vote in our recertification elections to retain our certification. Beyond this, our SOI cards will now be scanned and counted with Artificial Intelligence (AI), and we will not be notified which cards are invalidated. We will only be notified of the determination the AI makes as to whether or not we have enough valid SOI cards from the unit list they choose to use to count our cards.
The result of these conditions is a landscape where unions have to spend enormous energy simply proving we still deserve to exist, cycle after cycle. Where we’re constantly in laborious SOI card drives with shrinking expiration windows and changing unit lists; where PERC (Florida’s Public Employees Relations Commission)-run elections swallow months of organizing time; with bans on arbitration for personnel decisions and heavier financial reporting required of unions. Where we have to fight to preserve release time that the law technically permits, but institutions quietly withhold in preemptive and presumptive compliance. Even the basics of organizing are harder than they should be: bargaining unit lists are always stripped of phone numbers and addresses, unit rosters contain errors that leave people uncounted or misclassified, and we never receive a delineated list of graduate assistant office locations leaving our leaders roaming the halls hunting down workers. For Florida’s grad organizers, the fight to simply locate our own coworkers and maintain the survival of our unions through each new law and regulation comes before the fight on their behalf can truly begin.
Setting Priorities: Who Comes First? Who Will I be in the Aftermath?
Our dueling identities steal from each other, and that’s by design. Meeting the demands of SB 1296 often means neglecting our student identity, pushing research and program benchmarks to the side in favor of union work. This leads to stalled research, funding loss, and stress-related health conditions. These complications tied directly to the pace and precarity of organizing under Florida’s legal regime are becoming a familiar story among Florida’s graduate union leaders. I was speaking with another graduate student union leader in Florida recently, and they said it felt like they had to choose between saving their union, finishing their dissertation, or saving themself. Another described the emergence of health conditions from the stress. Another had to add another year to their program of study, unfunded, due to delays in research related to the increased organizing load. These anecdotes capture perfectly the specific anxiety, mental and physical consequences, and related experiences of being a graduate labor unionist in this state. I can’t tell you how long I have had nightmares about decertification, about what happens to the 9,542 graduate student workers our local represents across the state if we lose our chapters. When I close my eyes, I am drowning; when I wake up, I’m still drowning. Where do we go from here?
Concrete Stakes and Creative Organizing
It is here, stretching between warring worlds and fighting for the right to exist and the opportunity to thrive, that we find some of our most creative organizing. The material stakes are not abstract, but we must be light on our feet and malleable. At the bargaining table we fight for higher wages, of course. But we also fight for fee relief for graduate assistants taxed by the institutions that employ us, protections for international graduate workers facing increasing attacks at the state and federal levels, anti-discrimination language that goes beyond the bare minimum required by state law, consistent working hours capped every week, campus free speech rights, and financial benefits that help claw back what little of the wages we take home. On campus, we organize collectively around safe workplaces, safety for our international and immigrant students, racial and social justice, and the freedom to learn untethered by restrictive policies policing our curriculum and instruction in the classroom.
As international graduate workers face threats on campus when 287(g) agreements between local police and federal immigration authorities turn ordinary campus interactions into potential deportation risks and Florida gears up to bar students “not lawfully present in the United States” from enrolling in classes, we organize and bargain around support for our international student population and workplace safety for all in the ICE age. Furthermore, the classroom itself has become contested ground as academic freedom comes under simultaneous pressure. At the University of South Florida, the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus was handed over to the New College of Florida amid the broader, politically driven overhaul of NCF, leaving graduate workers there to fear for their jobs and our union fighting to preserve them through impact bargaining. All of this happens without the right to strike, without the one tool that gives most labor fights their sharpest teeth.
An Injury to One, An Injury to All: Coalition Building and Collective Power
Facing this onslaught of attacks alone isn’t sustainable, which is why coalition-building across labor sectors matters so much in this space. Florida’s Graduate Assistants United chapters have built partnerships with AFL-CIO regional Central Labor Councils, linking graduate unions to the wider labor movement and to workers fighting overlapping versions of the same fight. In my capacity as a delegate to the West Central Florida Central Labor Council and Chair of the West Central Florida Future Labor Leaders (the CLC’s Young Worker’s chapter), I’ve built a network with flight attendants, letter carriers, postal workers, iron and steel workers, electricians, painters, teachers, healthcare workers, and unionists from so many other labor sectors that helps us build out a network of support and solidarity for all public sector unions affected by SB 1296. We have learned so much from our partnerships with other labor unionists. Partnering with postal workers has shaped strategies for defending ballot integrity in our PERC recertification elections. Flight attendants have helped us build plans for collective action in potentially hostile workplaces. Teamsters have pushed us to be bolder in our actions and at the bargaining table. Cross-union trainings are now building frameworks to support locals struggling under SB 1296’s weight.
It’s also worth noting how often our coalitions can circle back on themselves: I’ve met many labor leaders active in Central Labor Councils today who got their start in graduate union organizing, some even coming from my very own chapter. Grad labor experience has a way of following people into whatever comes next, seeding the broader movement long after they’ve left campus. Too often we get hung up on affiliations and sectors, job types and union types, when we should be coalescing around the common struggles we all face as workers in the world. When we work together, we expand our understanding of the labor movement and how we fit into it. When we stand together, we accomplish more than we ever could alone.
Conclusions
Being a graduate student worker and labor organizer in Florida means holding tight to two identities the law is actively trying to pull apart, while trying to build something durable enough to survive any single person’s tenure in it. It means stitching together labor sectors and identities that don’t always see eye to eye, and it looks like gritty, scrappy fighting at the bargaining table and on the streets to build a better future for every generation of graduate workers. To be a graduate student worker in Florida means experiencing grief for the research that doesn’t get done, fear for the members you can’t always reach, love for those who walk beside you through these storms, and a stubborn refusal to let this fight end in defeat. Ever.