Yeah, unions can usefully do things where they’re negotiating with the university over e.g. pay or benefits but a supervisor? How? Outside of “My daddy arrange

Yeah, unions can usefully do things where they’re negotiating with the university over e.g. pay or benefits but a supervisor? How? Outside of “My daddy arranged a new chair so I could get in here.” students have ~0 leverage. Academia is feudal, at least in fields based on Ph.D.s. Your supervisor can make it impossible for you to graduate at any time with minimal impact for them. If you graduate and they don’t want you to get an academic job you won’t. That’s what letters of recommendation are for, just with the usual justification flipped. This isn’t a necessary part of academia. Law and medicine don’t work that way because their terminal degrees are Master’s degrees with elephantiasis. But absent getting rid of PhDs or changing them so radically you might as well change the name the power imbalance isn’t going anywhere.