Organizing workers does not necessarily require joining a huge national labor union that was obviously not meant for the type of problems grad students face. It's fucking weird to me that so many schools have joined United Auto Workers. I don't see any real changes to the problems with academic training at any of those schools. And I don't see why UE will be better here. The power imbalance in grad school is very different from the typical labor situations:
1) Grad student roles are extremely heterogeneous compared to laborers. The union at Harvard for example is trying to represent both TAs and RAs, in departments ranging from literature to biology to math, all as part of one collective bargaining agreement. There are huge differences in the problems those students face, and that's before getting into how different student experiences can be even amongst e.g. biology RAs.
2) Grad students receive atypical compensation, not just the degree itself but also things that are clearly not quantified by the union orgs - the (often falsely promised) academic freedom to pursue independent research interests and the time and resources to do some learning for the sake of it. Further, for RAs it can be impossible to untangle work that counts towards the degree requirement and work that is being done in exchange for stipend/other benefits.
3) Graduate school is only a short portion of someone's overall career in the grand scheme of things, while existing unions mainly focus on jobs that can be/often are lifelong. Grad school is by definition a stepping stone. Nobody asks "what do you want to do when you're done being a cop".
4) Most grad students at least enter their programs with the goal of themselves reaching professorship. Auto workers are not trying to build towards owning an automobile factory.
5) There is not a sub-20% acceptance rate for becoming an electrical worker. At many of the schools that are forming unions lately, there are tons of departments with highly competitive admissions processes for the PhD. Some at MIT are easily in the single digits acceptance rate, and this is amongst a specialized pool to begin with.