COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

By COURTNEY LEATHERMAN

Thousands of teaching assistants across the University of California System are threatening to stage the biggest strike by graduate students that higher education has ever seen.

Their plan is not only to disrupt instruction at some

ALSO SEE: Join the debate: Should teaching assistants be considered primarily students or employees? Should they have the right to unionize? (The responses)

of the most prestigious universities in the United States, but to add momentum to the drive to unionize graduate students. If they win, the number of U.S. universities with bargaining units for T.A.'s would increase by nearly 50 per cent, to 26 institutions.

While the teaching assistants are tight-lipped about the exact timing of the strike, they promise that the job action will be more protracted and damaging to the university system than anything they have staged before -- worse than the 25 days of strikes for union recognition on five campuses in 1996-97.

To be sure, the teaching assistants would like to see lots of improvements in their employment packages, such as better benefits and grievance procedures. But they are focusing on a single, key victory from the strike: recognition for their right to bargain collectively.

If they win that right -- through the strike or continuing legal battles -- it could have a profound impact on the economics of graduate education and the life of graduate students in California and beyond.

"A lot of academic-student employees are going to be looking at this strike to see whether or not they should organize," says Ricardo Ochoa, a law student at the University of California at Berkeley and a union leader. "A victory here is going to send a strong message throughout the country for people to not only organize, but to not be deterred by an intransigent administration."

T.A.'s on all of the University of California's campuses except San Francisco and Hastings College of Law have formed unions affiliated with the United Auto Workers, and those union locals have planned a walkout for this fall term. The U.A.W. has authorized the payment of benefits to students who strike.

Granting recognition to the unions would mean that the university system would have to first recognize the students as employees -- something that has been an insurmountable hurdle both at California and across academe.

In fact, the tactics and the rhetoric used by both sides in this dispute are familiar -- they've been rehearsed on other campuses as the T.A.-union movement has intensified. Teaching assistants on 18 campuses around the country now have bargaining units, and union success on the California campuses would raise that number to 26. Seven other campuses outside California have fledgling union movements. The drive for collective bargaining began at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where, in 1969, the first contract in the country between teaching assistants and an administration was negotiated.

This year, with California as the battleground, the scope of the strike alone may set a precedent. Moreover, the California system produces many of the nation's newly minted Ph.D.'s -- more than 6 per cent in 1996-97 -- and politics learned in the Golden State often reach beyond its borders.

Union victories on the eight California campuses could spur more organizing. But union losses could gut nascent organizing by other graduate students and reinforce their administrations' resolve.

Neither side in California is banking just on the success or failure of a strike to settle the score. Both the administration and the U.A.W. are hoping that a decision from the state labor board will accomplish that.

A case involving U.C.L.A. is now pending before the state board. The case stems from a 1996 decision in which an administrative-law judge for the labor board ruled that teaching assistants at U.C.L.A. had a right to bargain. The university appealed his decision to the labor board itself, which has yet to rule.

"U.C.L.A. is the biggie," says Peter Chester, a labor-relations coordinator for the university system. "Whatever decision is rendered in that case is bound to hold some precedential value for other locations," he explains.

In the meantime, U.C.L.A. has followed the university system's direction, refusing to negotiate with the union locals or recognize them. The threat of a massive strike this fall hasn't changed that. Officials say that strikes held in recent years have not been overly disruptive, and they're not persuaded that the latest strike plan has widespread support. Even so, administrators have been plotting their own strategy for how to counter any job action, including hiring replacement workers.

The university has been fighting teaching assistants' efforts to unionize for 15 years. A battle with T.A.'s at Berkeley was decided in 1992 by a state appellate court that found that teaching assistants on that campus were not employees as defined by a state statute -- the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act. But that ruling didn't end the dispute.

The systemwide battle raging today is over the interpretation of the state statute and its definition of employees. The law stipulates that students may be considered employees if the work they do is "unrelated to their educational objectives" or if those objectives "are subordinate to the services they perform." But even if those standards were met, the university would not be forced to recognize students as employees if doing so would detract from the purposes of the act -- to encourage research and teaching and develop "harmonious and cooperative labor relations."

In 1992 a state appellate court was persuaded in the Berkeley case that "collective bargaining would interfere with the mentor/student relationship, damaging the stature of the university and its ability to attract the best students and faculty." In a unanimous decision, the three-judge panel concluded: "The University has struck a delicate balance between employment and financial support to attract and assist these graduate students. This well-tuned system could easily be disrupted by introduction of collective bargaining on the behalf of thousands of graduate students whose self-interest might outweigh concern for the institution."

But in 1996, an administrative-law judge for the state labor board, James W. Tamm, ruled that the Berkeley decision was a bad one, and that the facts were different at U.C.L.A. In his 129-page decision, Judge Tamm said that he wouldn't dicker over whether teaching assistants were students or employees. "It is clear that the individuals at issue are both."

In an interview, he explained his overall conclusion. "When I balanced the value of the services to the university compared with the value to graduate T.A.'s, I found that the university benefited more," he said. "In fact, the university would be hard-pressed to carry on without the services of graduate teaching assistants."

The university disagrees, and it's sticking with the court's reasoning. Officials have suggested that no matter how important the labor board's decision on U.C.L.A. is, only another court case would force the university to change its position.

"Collective bargaining with graduate students for their role as T.A.'s would have a negative impact on the professor/student relationship," says Wyatt R. Hume, executive vice-chancellor for the U.C.L.A. campus. "We don't wish to compromise what we see as a very good educational, instructional, mentoring relationship."

After all, Mr. Hume notes, graduate students weren't accepted into the university because of their teaching ability. The administration views the teaching assistants as apprentices who are learning while they teach. Professors opposed to the union agree, and say that graduate students have an alternative to working as teaching assistants: pay full tuition, just like undergraduates.

This academic year, teaching assistants working 20 hours a week at U.C.L.A. earn between $13,000 and $16,000 over nine months; they also pay only 10 per cent of their tuition and receive free hospitalization. Research assistants earn between $15,000 and $19,000 over 12 months. But the duties of research assistants are usually directly connected to their degrees. Teaching assistants teach a range of courses that may have nothing to do with their dissertation topics, or sometimes, even their disciplines.

Curtis Gruenler, who earned his Ph.D. in English from U.C.L.A. last year, remembers being one of the few graduate students in his department who opposed unionization. Now an assistant professor at Hope College, he believes graduate students are, first and foremost, students, and that that status defines their work. But Mr. Gruenler also suspects the situation for graduate students in English was better than in other departments, where teaching posts were scarce, and where graduate students were fewer in number and therefore had less bargaining power.

"I can understand how graduate students would feel overwhelmed or even oppressed," Mr. Gruenler says. "But stepping back, being a graduate student at U.C.L.A. was such a privilege, it's hard to compare it to the situations of other laborers in classic union struggles. I felt to take that attitude seemed a little overblown."

Robin Fisher, associate dean of the graduate division at U.C.L.A., thinks bargaining with his campus's union -- the Student Association of Graduate Employees, or SAGE -- would require rigid, across-the-board rule making. He sees a fundamental conflict between the academic judgments the university must weigh and the economic interests a union looks out for.

Now, he says, when he's involved in deciding which students get what level of financial support, his job is to focus on students' educational needs, and not on their need to put food on the table.

Whatever the bread-and-butter issues underlying the push for unionization, Mr. Fisher suspects, "The fundamental issues here are intergenerational conflicts. You're in an organization where the authority resides with those folks who are older and more experienced, but the energy resides with those who are younger and who would like to have the authority. This is nothing new, it's just the modern expression of something you would have found in the Medieval university."

Richard Hurd, a professor of labor studies at Cornell University, thinks that, in fact, a lot has changed since the Middle Ages, but colleges aren't willing to admit it. He notes that administrators fighting teaching assistants' unions usually make the philosophical argument that the T.A.'s aren't employees.

"That's the P.R. response," he says. "I don't place a lot of stock in that. Contemporary universities are administered in a much more businesslike fashion than they used to be." What he does put stock in is money. "If they're resisting to this degree, it's because of concern that a successful T.A. union will substantially increase the cost of undergraduate education," he says. "If they didn't have that concern there would be no pragmatic business reason to resist, especially in the face of a strike."

While the fight in California has meant big legal bills for the university, Mr. Hurd suspects those would be dwarfed by the amount of money it would cost to improve salaries and benefits for teaching assistants -- a demand that would surely follow union recognition.

For now, the issue isn't about wages, it's about respect, says Christopher Thinnes, a fifth-year graduate student in English at U.C.L.A. He remembers how overwhelmed he felt teaching his first class. "I didn't want more money, but I certainly didn't want to walk into an environment where the administration's rhetoric framed me as some sort of apprentice to some sort of adviser I'd never met," he says. "I found it incredibly insulting." Like other students, Mr. Thinnes says he's received very little instruction from professors in whose courses he has worked as a T.A. In fact, veteran teaching assistants teach the courses on how to be a T.A.

Connie M. Razza, a Ph.D. student in English at U.C.L.A., thinks that the university is saying that the part-time teaching positions are not real work. "The kind of work that most of us can expect to do for the rest of our lives is part-time work with really bad benefits," says Ms. Razza, a union leader. "When we're no longer graduate students but doing very similar work, are they still going to say it's not work?"

Union supporters don't believe that collective bargaining would infringe on the real guidance that takes place between students and their dissertation advisers. They argue that bargaining would not intrude on the relationships that are truly academic, only on those that are economic.

For example, students commonly complain that they don't find out until a few weeks or days before a term begins whether they have a teaching assistantship. That means either that they must scramble to prepare for a course, or scavenge for another way to pay the bills.

Graduate students are limited to 12 quarters of teaching -- unless they receive a special exception -- so that they aren't too burdened to finish their dissertations, administrators say. And teaching assistants are limited to working 20 hours a week. Students often complain that they must work more hours to keep up with the needs of hundreds of undergraduates; faculty members say that that is a typical complaint of rookie teachers. T.A.'s teach about 15 per cent of the 1,650 courses offered at U.C.L.A. every quarter. In addition, they lead most of the 2,000 discussion sections of large lecture courses.

The administration and the union locals disagree about what proportion of the university's instruction and advising the graduate students are responsible for. The union says 60 per cent. U.C.L.A. officials believe the proportion is closer to 20 or 30 per cent. Basically, students say they are looking for a measure of control over their lives. "The union would create greater evenness or regularity across the board, in terms of the kind of work we do and the conditions we work under," says Manali Desai, a Ph.D. student in sociology.

Many professors support the union campaign. Edna Bonacich, a professor of sociology and ethnic studies at the Riverside campus, supports the union effort -- as a matter of democracy. "They want a union," she says. "Who are we, paternalistically, to tell them they shouldn't have one?" She doesn't worry that the union would interfere with advising.

"The model of an apprentice is someone watching over you, teaching you how to stick the bolt into the nut. It doesn't work that way here," she says. "The model is not, 'We will teach you how to be a professor.'"

She adds: "Being a T.A. is not learning how to teach. It's doing the scutwork, a lot of scutwork."

However professors want to describe that work, the administration has made clear that the faculty is ultimately responsible for it, regardless of any strike by T.A.'s. In memoranda to department heads, administrators have reminded professors of their duty for keeping instruction going, and have warned that the strike may extend through final exams and grading.

Mr. Fisher, the associate dean at U.C.L.A., says he has advised professors that they may want to make some changes in the types of exams they give or hire some replacement workers.

In response, the union is digging in. "Our tactic is this: The university is not going to be able to mitigate the strike," says Christopher Schemers, a Ph.D. student in political science. "We'll adjust strategy."

Neil Bucklew, a professor of management and industrial relations at West Virginia University and its past president, watches the showdown with an outsider's perspective. Thirty years ago, he was a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who sat on the adminis tration's side of the table as it negotiated with the country's first T.A. union. Mr. Bucklew believes it is better to grant collective-bargaining rights than to go through a bitter fight over recognition.

"Generally, in our society, we have moved past the recognition issue," he says. "Prior to the 1930s, if a group of employees wanted recognition, normally they had to strike to get it. But we decided that was a scene we didn't need. We watched it in the railroad industry, the steel industry, the mines, and we decided it wasn't necessary -- it turned violent and ugly -- and it, in and of itself, had no value."

He thinks higher education needs to learn those lessons, too.

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