The American Federation of Teachers has released a set of national standards for the employment of graduate research and teaching assistants. The faculty union called for better treatment of graduate assistants at a news conference at Ohio State University, where the campus’s Graduate Employees and Students Organization will kick off a union drive.
Like many colleges and universities, Ohio State argues that graduate assistants are students and that the teaching and research they perform should be considered part of their educational training. A university spokesman said that Ohio State sees no need for a graduate-student union.
But the AFT said graduate assistants should be recognized, first and foremost, as employees and should have the right to organize. The union also suggested that institutions should provide graduate assistants with fair pay, health and retirement benefits, full tuition waivers, and adequate professional support.
The standards are outlined in a report titled “Recognition and Respect: Standards of Good Practice in the Employment of Graduate Employees,” which is available on the union’s Web site.
In July delegates at the AFT’s biennial convention, in Washington, D.C., approved the standards. The AFT represents 150,000 college and university faculty and staff members, including 16,000 graduate assistants.
Jamie Horwitz, a spokesman for the AFT, said that, like a similar report it released two years ago on standards for part-time faculty members (The Chronicle, August 2, 2002), the union hopes the new report will serve as a blueprint for what graduate assistants should be striving for. “We have now a tool we can take to legislatures,” he said.
Mr. Horwitz said that, in an alarming trend, colleges are increasingly relying on adjuncts and graduate students to teach courses and do work that otherwise would be done by full-time tenured or tenure-track professors. In 2001, according to the new report, 260,000 teaching and research assistants were employed on a part-time basis by colleges, and those assistants made up 20 percent of the instructional ranks.
The report also notes that despite the valuable work they do, doctoral students, who make up the largest proportion of graduate assistants, earned on average only 64 percent of their average cost of living in 2000, and that many had had to supplement their income by taking out hefty loans. (Doctoral students’ stipends averaged about $11,700 that year and tuition waivers averaged $5,525, while their average annual living expenses totaled $26,805.)
After conducting a survey of graduate-student life, Ohio State last April raised the minimum monthly stipend for its graduate assistants to $1,000 from $900. It also increased the health-care subsidy it provides to graduate students.
The AFT report lays out standards in four main categories: compensation, fair employment practices, standards of professional support, and union rights. The report includes the following recommendations:
Compensation
- Graduate assistants should be paid “a fair salary” that covers their academic and living expenses.
- They should receive full tuition waivers and should not have to pay student fees for semesters in which they work.
- They should receive full health-care and retirement benefits and have access to long-term disability insurance, life insurance, and child-care options.
Fair Employment Practices
- Institutions should have “clear and rational hiring practices” for graduate assistants, including notifying them of appointments early enough before the start of a term to give them sufficient time to prepare.
- Institutions should define graduate assistants’ workload expectations by department and provide a way to compensate them if they work beyond a set maximum.
- Graduate assistants should be subject to a fair evaluation process.
- Graduate assistants should not be reclassified as adjunct faculty members as a means of moving them out from under the protections of collective-bargaining agreements.
Standards of Professional Support
- Institutions should provide a paid orientation and continuing training and professional development for graduate assistants.
- Graduate assistants should enjoy the same level of academic freedom as regular faculty members in courses and discussion sections for which they have full responsibility.
- Graduate assistants who have passed a probation should be able to serve on departmental and institutional committees.
Union Rights
- National unions should commit to organizing graduate employees.
- Unions for faculty and professional staffs should encourage and assist graduate assistants in forming unions on campuses where they are not organized.
- If part of a union includes members who are not graduate students, graduate assistants should have full voting rights on all union issues.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 51, Issue 9, Page A16