Union Power in Ivory Towers

At Yale University this past Friday, hundreds of graduate students, joined by union organizers and professors, gathered on the campus to protest Yale's increasing use of graduate students and non-tenure track instructors.

"It seems that people are more concerned about the bottom line than about the academics," says Curtis Z. Mitchell, a second-year graduate student in Yale's mathematics department and chair of Yale's Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO).

This weekend's rally is part of a larger resurgence in union activity by graduate student workers across the nation in the past four years, most in the country's state universities.

With higher-education institutions relying more on teaching assistants (TAs) and part-time faculty as opposed to full-time faculty to teach undergraduates, graduate students, who serve as these TAs, are fighting to gain rights equal to the work they perform.

Second-Class Employees

According to Connie M. Razza, a fifth-year graduate student in the English department at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a spokesperson for the Student Association of Graduate Employees-United Auto Workers (SAGE-UAW) at UCLA, the main problem facing graduate students is their exclusion from the employment process.

"It's really simply that we do so much of the teaching [in colleges] without having a say in the terms and conditions of the working environment," Razza said.

Because graduate student workers are seldom full-time, they often are not covered by the policies protecting other employees. Mitchell sees "casualization" as the major problem facing Yale and other institutions currently.

Casualization--the increasing use of part-time and contractual labor--is largely responsible for the recent resurgence in the labor movement on college campuses across the United States, according to a GESO study.

"Over the last five years, people have become increasingly aware of casualization where tenure track professors are retiring, and their positions aren't replaced," Mitchell said. "Instead, adjunct teachers and graduate students are being hired to do the same teaching."

As a result of this practice, Mitchell said there is a surplus of Ph.D. candidates because colleges accept more graduate students to teach at reduced salaries but then do not offer them any opportunity for occupational advancement.

Antony Dugdale, a sixth-year student in Yale's philosophy and religion department and GESO member, said practices which adversely affect graduate students also harm undergraduates.

"[Casualization] is a great way for universities to get teaching done by cheap workers," Dugdale said. "This is great for the endowment but not great for the undergraduate. Undergrads should have permanent, stable teachers instead of a fly-by-night workforce."

By providing graduate students with better working conditions, Dugdale said undergraduates would also benefit since graduate students could concentrate on teaching instead of worrying about making ends meet. He also said giving graduate students opportunities for job advancement would help undergraduates since it would provide them with a stable teaching staff.

However, undergraduates are being taught and evaluated more by non-permanent teachers than by full-time faculty. In a study recently released by the GESO, it was reported that nearly 70 percent of undergraduate classroom instruction at Yale is performed by graduate students or adjunct instructors while faculty only perform 30 percent of this instruction.

Furthermore, these TA's perform the bulk of "behind-the-scenes" grading and evaluation of undergraduate work.

While the GESO is affiliated with the Local 34 and 35 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, Yale has refused to recognize the union, insisting that they are students and not workers which has prevented the GESO from negotiating with the university.

"We want Yale to recognize our union, negotiate with it, and negotiate a contract," Dugdale said. "Yale pretends like we don't exist."

TAs of the World, Unite!

While graduate students at Yale University have not experienced much success in their dealings with the administration, students at other schools across the nation have made great strides in improving their working conditions.

One of the most recent victories occurred at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor this month when graduate students and university administrators reached an agreement which raised wages and other compensation for international graduate students who are required to stay in Michigan during the summer for English workshops.

Nicholas R. Olmsted, a second-year student in Michigan's philosophy department and vice-president of the Graduate Employees Organizations (GEO), believes that unions played a critical role in achieving these concessions. The GEO is associated with the American Federation of Teachers and the AFL-CIO.

"There's no question that graduate students who are unionized are much better off than graduate students who aren't," Olmsted said. "People at universities who don't have union affiliation should work as hard as possible to get a union together."

Kevin C. Wehr, a third-year sociology student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and president of the Teaching Assistant Association, agrees that their union, the AFL-CIO, was a powerful weapon in recent contract negotiations that resulted in tuition wavers for many graduate students.

"Unions are a good thing because they help to define the relations between the administration and its employees," Wehr said. "Unions can act as an incredible participant in politics and can model democratic practices on a large scale."

While the students at UCLA have not received benefits like those at Ann Arbor or Wisconsin, they recently won a major legal battle when UCLA TAs and other graduate teachers voted to be represented by an affiliate of the UAW.

This forced administrators to officially recognize the union and immediately begin negotiations. Razza said similar elections would be held on the seven other UC campuses by the end of this school year.

The Road Ahead

However, while these organizations have made tremendous advancements in their fight to gain better working conditions, they are not satisfied to simply remain content with the victories they have made.

Instead, leaders of these graduate student organizations have said they will continue their struggle until graduate students are fully recognized for the contributions they have made to college education.

For graduate organizations which have already had success in their dealings with administrations, future goals are much broader and are aimed at improving graduate student employment conditions both locally and nationally.

"What we would really like to do is to drive towards a living wage for graduate student instructors," Olmsted said. "Currently, grad students [in Ann Arbor] don't get paid as well as public school teachers in the most impoverished school districts where they receive considerably more per hour than grad students. We feel that a higher level of compensation is merited."

Wehr added that he sees the graduate student labor movement as feeding into a larger, progressive labor movement.

"In the long run, the goals of the progressive movement should be to reassert itself," Wehr said. "On a national level, labor could do a better job of asserting the interests of its members."

For graduate students at schools like Yale and UCLA who are just beginning the process of gaining more rights, their goals are centered on their specific schools.

"Right now, we're in the process of surveying our membership and that will determine our agenda [at negotiations with UCLA administrators this summer]," Razza said.

Members of the Yale grad student organization, which is still far from the negotiating table, say they will be concentrating on keeping their issues in the spotlight.

"For the time being, the more visibility we have and the more graduate students we have speaking out on this issue, the harder it is to ignore us," Mitchell said. "We have to keep working until Yale agrees to negotiate with us."

With the continuing dependence on graduate students for teaching in colleges and universities, it seems unlikely that graduate students will stop their fight anytime soon. As Mitchell indicated, the movement won't truly be a success until universities across the nation recognize the rights of all its workers.

"The goal is really to change the process of decision making in the academy so that the decisions respect the rights of all the people who are involved," Mitchell said.