The Chronicle of Higher Education
Date: February 21, 1997
Section: Opinion
Page: B6
By Tamara Joseph and Jon Curtiss
The National Labor Relations Board's recent filing of a complaint against Yale University, charging it with illegal retaliation last year against striking graduate-teaching assistants, opens a new chapter in the history of graduate students' efforts to form unions. Three such unions won recognition during the 1970s, and a second wave of unionizing efforts has been building since 1990. Witness the recent decisions to unionize at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the University of Kansas, and the University of Iowa.
There are currently 12 recognized unions for graduate students who are employed by universities -- all of them at state institutions. These unions, representing graduate students working as teachers, researchers, and staff members, invariably have had to fight legal battles to establish that graduate students are in fact employees, and not simply students who work as part of their training or financial-aid packages. Since graduate employees at state institutions are governed by state labor laws, they have had to fight this legal battle state by state. In an important decision, an administrative-law judge in California recently ruled that teaching assistants, teaching associates, teaching fellows, and tutors at the University of California at Los Angeles are employees under the state's collective-bargaining law.
Until the strike at Yale, however, the employee status of teaching assistants at private institutions has been uncertain. The Yale administration has contended that it cannot be guilty of unfair labor practices, because its striking teaching assistants were only students, not workers protected by law from retaliation. We, and thousands of graduate students across the country, believe that the fact that the National Labor Relations Board has filed charges against Yale will help to settle the question definitively and establish that graduate employees at all private institutions do have the right to union representation. An administrative- law judge who will hear the charges cannot decide whether Yale engaged in unfair labor practices without deciding whether teaching assistants are employees. Such a ruling would unleash a new wave of unionization efforts at private universities.
This prospect raises a key question: Will faculty members support these efforts by teaching assistants? Faculty members frequently have done so. During the 1995 unionization drive by teaching assistants at the University of Kansas, for example, many faculty members approached the union's publicity tables to take buttons, express support, and talk regretfully about their own failed drive to form a faculty union some years before. At the University of Michigan last year, many faculty members honored the union's picket lines during a two-day walkout.
On the other hand, some faculty members have become upset, angry, and hostile when faced with a union picket line. The much-publicized grade action at Yale, when striking T.A.'s refused to turn in grades for the classes that they taught, was remarkable for the viciousness with which many faculty members, including some espousing "progressive" politics, opposed the attempts of their students. Faculty members charged graduate employees with academic misconduct, threatened to discharge them from their teaching duties and to bar them from future teaching appointments, and wrote them damning letters of recommendation -- all because the students had participated in activities designed to press the administration to recognize and negotiate with the union.
As graduate students, we find it appalling to see faculty members whom we admire use their power in this way. One of us, formerly a graduate student in English at Yale, no longer keeps the work of certain faculty members on her bookshelves. Knowing how willingly some professors resorted to threats, coercion, and slander, she cannot read their books without literally becoming nauseated. Who can take seriously the opinions of scholars who have shown themselves so lacking in common sense and moral judgment?
"Many faculty here got confused," union member David Sanders, a graduate student in history, told us recently. "The Yale administration convinced them that they were middle management and that a graduate-employee union was the sign of their failure to do their job. Instead of recognizing that, as teachers and researchers, they had everything to gain from supporting us, they engaged in some plain, old-fashioned union-busting."
The recent action by the National Labor Relations Board suggests the first reason that faculty members should at the very least abstain from retaliating against graduate students attempting to unionize: It is against the law.
Yet faculty members should do much more than just abstain from retaliating. Every reason exists for them to support unionization efforts actively. Graduate-student employees, like any other workers, should and do have the right to choose to be represented by a union. This is the basic issue at stake in most conflicts or strikes involving graduate-student employees. Graduate-student instructors are a cheap and essentially captive labor force, upon whom universities increasingly have become dependent for basic teaching. They teach as much as 40 per cent of the classroom hours at many institutions. As they do more and more of the essential teaching work of the university, it becomes increasingly clear that they are, indeed, university employees.
Faculty members may disagree with their graduate students about whether a union is appropriate in an academic setting, or whether the "collegial" relationship between faculty members and graduate students will be destroyed if teaching assistants have enforceable rights. Ultimately, however, the decision is not the faculty's to make. If a majority of graduate employees on a campus democratically decide to pursue union representation, faculty members should respect that choice.
Moreover, when unions help teaching assistants win better wages and working conditions, the mission of the university is ultimately served: Students don't have to work extra jobs that take time away from their teaching and scholarly work, and students from a wider range of economic backgrounds can afford to pursue graduate education. Unions also fight for better training, smaller classes, and other improvements in undergraduate education. Indeed, we have found that faculty members who attended unionized graduate schools themselves generally support unions for teaching assistants.
At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Teaching Assistants' Association has represented graduate-student employees since 1969 and is poised to begin negotiations for its next contract. For years after the union was recognized, graduate-student employees at the university fared well, earning a relatively high salary and paying only modest in- state tuition rates. However, as state support for higher education has dwindled, tuition rates have soared high above inflation, eroding hard-won salary gains and leaving grad students with next-to-nothing incomes once tuition payments are deducted from their paychecks. Some faculty members have already begun to show support for the union's demand for a tuition waiver for graduate-student employees. They know that their departments' ability to attract and retain good graduate students depends on the union's success in improving the students' financial circumstances.
The Graduate Employees Organization has represented student instructors at the University of Michigan since 1975. Historically, it has worked to improve the quality of undergraduate instruction, negotiating for mandatory training in pedagogical techniques and more resources for teaching assistants. In its most recent contract, for example, the union created a Joint Pedagogy Committee, with representatives of both the administration and the union, to help graduate students develop and improve their teaching skills.
As Darcy Leach, vice-president of the graduate-employees union, adds, "A union provides an avenue for graduate students to contribute their ideas and initiate new projects, which benefit the whole university. People who feel that they can actually influence and change their environment have a much greater incentive to participate and contribute." Undergraduates at Michigan seem to understand this point and have responded with strong support for the union. The student government, for example, passed several resolutions supporting the union negotiations.
The most fundamental reason for faculty members to support graduate-student unions, however, is the reason that graduate students form unions in the first place: the changing nature of academic employment. From 1969 through 1992, the number of part-time workers in America increased about 90 per cent; the number currently stands at about 17 per cent of the work force. The rate of part-time employment in higher education is much higher than the national average -- about 45 per cent.
This bleak employment picture has important implications for graduate students. Graduate school no longer is an apprenticeship assuring entry into a secure and remunerative profession. Graduate students can't afford seven or eight years of living at an income well below the poverty level, because their future salaries probably won't pay off their debts. They are likely to end up cobbling together a living by teaching three or four courses a semester at three different institutions for $2,000 a course -- with no job security or benefits. Their teaching loads may double while their incomes remain basically the same.
These factors explain why graduate students are unionizing. They also explain why it is vital for faculty members to support them, and to consider unionizing themselves. University administrations increasingly are concluding that they simply do not need a tenured faculty to cover classroom instruction. In the short-term logic of the marketplace, it makes more sense to hire four adjuncts than to pay one professor the same amount of money. Unionization of those who perform the teaching work of the university -- graduate students and faculty members -- is the only effective way to oppose this trend. Tenured faculty members who don't want to see themselves replaced by overworked and underpaid adjuncts might want to lend their grad students a hand -- and learn some strategies for protecting their own jobs.
"Forming a union is what anyone should do in an industry where they work hard and aren't getting paid fairly or don't have health insurance," says George Lundskow, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Kansas and a member of the Graduate Teaching Assistants' Coalition there. "We're all teachers," he adds, "but we need to learn an old lesson from the labor movement."
If academic life is to be anything other than nasty, brutish, and short -- if any value is to be placed on teaching and those who do it -- it is vital for academic employees to join together and reclaim the value of education through the power of collective action. We ask faculty members to support our rights as workers. We certainly will support theirs.
Tamara Joseph is an organizer for the Graduate Employees Organization at the University of Michigan (A.F.T. Local 3550) and was a founding member of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale University. Jon Curtiss is an organizer for the Teaching Assistants' Association at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (A.F.T. Local 3220) and a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Michigan.