Syracuse University faculty, researchers vote to unionize in major campus labor shift

Syracuse University’s campus labor map widened again as postdoctoral researchers and non-tenure-track faculty voted to unionize, a move that could pull about 350 workers into collective bargaining over pay, workload and job security.

The vote passed the evening of April 23, with 76% of participating voters supporting the union effort organized under United Syracuse. The proposed unit includes postdoctoral researchers, teaching professors and professors of practice, a mix of instructors and researchers whose work is central to classrooms, labs and grant-backed projects across the Syracuse, New York campus.

Organizers pushed the campaign around a set of work rules that touch daily life on campus. They cited one-year contracts, pay transparency, more equitable workloads and stronger protections for international employees who can face visa-related uncertainty when jobs change or funding shifts. Those issues matter not only to individual workers, but also to Syracuse University’s ability to recruit and keep researchers who help sustain its research enterprise.

Syracuse University says union elections are secret-ballot contests supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. The university also says that if a union is approved, it becomes the exclusive representative for the bargaining unit, and that the institution would negotiate in good faith. University labor-relations materials list existing campus unions and say the school promotes positive labor-management relations.

The result fits into a larger shift already underway on South Campus, the Hill and beyond. Syracuse University graduate workers voted to unionize in 2023, and that organizing success added another layer to a campus that already has multiple bargaining units. If this new unit is certified, it would add to about 4,000 unionized workers already employed at the university.

For Onondaga County, the vote signals more than another labor headline. It puts a growing share of the university’s teaching and research workforce into formal negotiations over how Syracuse University handles contracts, assignments and protections in a period when universities nationwide are seeing more organizing among graduate employees, postdocs and contingent faculty. At Syracuse, the balance of power on campus just shifted again, and the next stage will be bargaining over what that means in practice.