This story was originally produced by the Valley News. NHPR publishes it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaboration.

After nearly a year of negotiations and a 60-day strike, Dartmouth College and its doctoral union have reached their first collective bargaining agreement.

Union members voted to ratify the agreement on Friday evening.

The contract marks the conclusion of talks between Dartmouth administration and the Graduate Organized Laborers of Dartmouth (GOLD-UE), founded in April 2023. The union has about 800 members who are studying and working as research and teaching assistants alongside their graduate degrees.

“People are very proud of our achievements,” David Freeman, a Dartmouth University graduate and member of the bargaining committee, said Friday. “There is still a lot of work to be done, but we have made great progress,” he added.

Currently, student assistants are paid around $40,000 per year. They are eligible for Dartmouth's student health insurance plan, which provides limited vision coverage but no dental insurance or dependent health insurance.

The three-year contract increases the stipend to $47,000, with a guaranteed cost-of-living adjustment of 3% annually. It also includes an enhanced benefits package that Dartmouth says is worth $129,035 for the 2023-24 academic year. That package includes full dental coverage, paid sick leave and a 40 percent contribution from the college toward dependents' health insurance premiums.

The agreement “reflects our commitment to supporting our graduate students while upholding the institution's core values ​​and operational needs,” Dartmouth Provost David Kotz said in a letter to the graduate school last Wednesday.

The contract also guarantees foreign students financial support for visa fees and required travel abroad. It provides for neutral arbitration of disputes and contains a precise definition of work duties in order to more clearly draw the sometimes unclear line between employee and student.

GOLD-UE's main demands were an increase in the scholarship including adjustment for the cost of living, better access to affordable childcare and more comprehensive health insurance benefits.

On May 1, International Workers' Day, union members went on strike, leaving classrooms and laboratories without teaching and research assistants, to force progress in negotiations.

“We are asking Dartmouth for a very, very small amount of money. It's not significant at all compared to the size of the endowment,” said Logan Mann, a member of the students' seven-person negotiating team, in early June. According to the college's 2023 financial report, Dartmouth's endowment is about $8 billion.

“We formed the union with a pretty clear goal of being able to afford to live where we already work,” Mann said last month.

The Dartmouth graduates are part of a recent union movement in higher education. “Almost all of our collective bargaining units in higher education were formed in the last four years,” Jonathan Kissam, UE's communications director, said Friday.

He attributed the increase to a 2016 decision by the National Labor Relations Board that allowed graduates of private universities to unionize. Before 2016, graduates were considered students, not employees, and thus were not eligible for collective bargaining.

“I'm really proud that we won this. It's a dramatic improvement over the previous situation,” said Genevieve Goebel, a member of the GOLD-UE negotiating committee, at an information session for doctoral students on Friday afternoon.

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