While many universities have fought their graduate worker unions or efforts to create them, most of them are not nearly as dedicated to doing so as Northeastern University in Boston, MA is right now. This off-the-radar university has been the sight of a particularly vicious anti-union campaign–one which has (unlikely, but not zero) potential to impact graduate worker unions as a whole.
Earlier this year in an effort to prevent its graduate worker union, Graduate Employees of Northeastern University (GENU-UAW), from seeking an election with the NLRB Northeastern challenged the eligibility of graduate workers to be employees at all. In effect, the university is challenging the Columbia decision of 2016, in which the NLRB established that students could be employees and furthermore that “there is no compelling reason—in theory or in practice—to conclude that collective bargaining by student assistants cannot be viable or that it would seriously interfere with higher education.” That decision paved the way for the wave of unionization on campuses that you're seeing now–and overruling it would have disastrous impacts for tens of thousands of newly unionized students. And all to prevent or delay one union election!
But Northeastern has also engaged in more traditional union-busting tactics–again to an extreme. In an email to all graduate students on campus, leadership at the university more-or-less implied GENU-UAW was doxing students and seeking otherwise confidential information as a part of the unionization process. Around the same time, the university hired Seyfarth Shaw LLP, a law firm tied intimately to union-busting. Seyfarth Shaw's founder helped draft the notorious Taft-Hartley Act; the law firm itself has decades of union-busting efforts under its belt which date so far back that they include fights with figures like Cesar Chavez. They've sought to divide the bargaining unit by arguing that Masters and PhD graduate workers cannot unionize together, and likewise with satellite campus workers.
Fortunately, GENU-UAW itself does not seem too rattled by all of this; no doubt a part of that is the union having been a work in progress for five years now. If anything, their demands–a living wage and cost of living protections, improving university health care coverage, and strong anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies–have only gotten more acute with time, and particularly in the last two years. They're optimistic that the NLRB will see through Northeastern's bullshit about graduate students not being workers. There's no timetable for when all of the litigation against their union will be resolved, but optimistically they think that will only defer the process about a semester. Here's hoping!