Years ago, academics
jokingly used to call the Ph.D. their “union card” because it provided entry to
the exclusive guild of professors. You don’t hear that hoary wisecrack anymore.
Some decades back, the doctorate stopped offering any assurance of a faculty
job.
But these days, many
graduate students working as teaching and research assistants in the United
States still want a union card, only a different kind—one that will allow them
to bargain collectively on pay and working conditions with the universities
that pay them to teach classes, grade exams, and do the hands-on labor of their
professors’ research. Unions, many graduate assistants believe, would also
provide them protection against unfair or arbitrary treatment by supervisors,
unexpected administrative changes in benefits, and other detrimental situations
where they currently lack power.
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To that end, union
organizing drives are underway or union groups are awaiting recognition by or
negotiations with their universities on two dozen campuses across the country,
according to the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU). Many
universities, however, especially private ones, have opposed
unionization—refusing to acknowledge that the graduate students they pay to
teach courses, grade papers, and do the labor of professors’ research are in
fact workers. Instead, they insist that these tasks form part of students’
education. Now, the change from the Obama administration to the Trump
administration appears to have sharpened the controversy.
A contested right
Graduate assistants can
form unions either by holding an election in which a majority of the workers
vote for union representation or by collecting signed statements requesting
union representation from a majority of workers (a process known as card
check). The institution can then either agree to recognize the union or—as has
been common in higher education—dispute it, in which case the organizers appeal
to a governing body for a decision on whether the institution must recognize
the union.
Public institutions
come under the laws of various states, some of which allow and others forbid
student assistant unions. For students at private universities, the right to
unionize is determined by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), whose
rulings have seesawed repeatedly over recent years. The NLRB’s five members are
presidentially appointed, making the board’s composition—and its
decisions—change from administration to administration. Democratic presidents’
appointees generally side with union advocates, finding that graduate
assistants meet the criteria, set in the National Labor Relations Act, of
workers eligible to form unions. Republicans’ appointees, conversely, have
generally agreed with private universities’ argument that the assistants are
predominantly students, and thus not workers entitled to unionize.
Graduate student unions
are currently recognized at 33 institutions or university systems, according to
the CGEU, the first having formed at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in
1969. All but one of those listed are public.
At one private
institution, Columbia University, the wait for recognition of the union that
teaching and research assistants voted to form in 2016 became so frustrating
that in April of this year they staged a weeklong strike—a mark of how
contentious the issue has become, with students and administrators staking out
opposite positions. In January, Columbia Provost John Coatsworth had written in
an email to the campus community that the university’s administration would not
negotiate with the union but instead would “seek review of the status of
student assistants by a federal appellate court.”
Although the union
considers that a 2016 NLRB decision permitting unionization settled the
question, Coatsworth was alluding to the decadeslong, much-litigated
controversy over whether graduate assistants at private universities even have
the right to unionize. Columbia is one of a number of leading private
institutions—including Brown University, Cornell University, Harvard University,
Princeton University, Stanford University, Yale University, and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology—that have argued before the NLRB that
graduate assistants are primarily students and thus not workers eligible to
unionize.
New York University’s
(NYU's) position as the sole private institution on the CGEU list of 33 harks
back to a case brought by NYU graduate assistants in 2000, during the Clinton
administration, when the NLRB declared assistants at private universities
workers eligible to unionize. Then, in 2004, under President George W. Bush,
the NLRB rescinded that right after Brown won a challenge. NYU, however,
voluntarily recognized the union in 2013—but only after the student assistants
went on strike in 2005, when their first contract expired, and also took other
actions in the intervening years.
In 2016, with the
Columbia case, the legal situation changed again when an NLRB majority
appointed by President Barack Obama asserted the assistants’ right to unionize.
In April of this year, however, an appointee of President Donald Trump tipped
the NLRB majority to Republican. Union proponents across the country now fear
another reversal. Incipient unions at Boston College, the University of
Chicago, and Yale—whose administrations oppose unionization—have withdrawn
filings that were pending before the NLRB to avoid potentially damaging
rejections of their petitions for recognition.
Notwithstanding the
possibility of another coming shift, American University, Brandeis University,
Tufts University, and the New School are negotiating with unions formed in the
aftermath of the Columbia decision. In May, Harvard also announced that it
would bargain with its newly formed graduate assistant union, with the proviso
that negotiations would only cover employment issues and not academic matters.
This distinction is unusual, University of Oregon union expert Gordon Lafer
told the Harvard Crimson, because no union has ever insisted on bargaining over
scholarly questions such as grades, recommendations, or tenure criteria. It is
also suspicious because it could mask attempts to reduce the topics open to
negotiation, Lafer said. It is unclear whether these agreements to negotiate
might be withdrawn should the NLRB again reverse itself in some future case.
Still, in another sign
of campus unionizing’s vitality, postdocs at the University of Washington in
Seattle voted in May to form the nation’s sixth union of postdocs. It, like all
other universities with postdoctoral unions, is public.
Too good a buy
Unionization opponents
have long argued, in Coatsworth’s words, that “the relationship of graduate
students to the faculty that instruct them must not be reduced to ordinary
terms of employment.” (The available research on unions does not find damage to
that relationship, but rather improvement.) It’s a deep and bitter irony that
decades after abandoning the central element of the relationship that for
generations defined the guild-style academic “union card”—the strongly felt
responsibility of established guild members to help their apprentices establish
careers of their own within the guild—universities are claiming part of that
history in order to deny student assistants the right to the newer-style union
card that would allow them to band together and try to improve their generally
penurious circumstances.
The two union cards
represent different kinds of unions and highlight the major shift in graduate
students’ status that has taken place over a number of decades. Academia of
yesteryear fashioned itself as a craft or trade union, like the historic craft
guilds of Europe, protecting the interests and incomes of highly skilled
workers by controlling access to occupations. Such unions provide entrance only
to people meeting approved standards, generally through apprenticeships,
qualifying tests, and other proofs of mastery. Skilled craftspeople such as
plumbers and electricians are modern examples of this type of union. The kind
of help that student assistants want now, on the other hand, is in the model of
industrial unions, which seek to unite the employees in a given workplace to
use their collective leverage to bargain for improved wages and working
conditions. In other words, graduate students have gone from protégés slated to
join their professors as colleagues in the ranks of the academic guild to
low-paid staffers carrying out tasks for their employers’ benefit with little
realistic chance of ever becoming professors.
Universities have
created this situation, according to a study published in January by the
Economic Policy Institute, in part by “increasingly rel[ying] on graduate
teaching assistants and contingent faculty, with the growth in graduate
assistant positions and non-tenure-track positions outpacing the increase in
tenured and tenure-track positions between Fall 2005 and Fall 2015.” Assistants
and adjuncts, of course, cost much less than tenure-track faculty, and their
low-paid work in classrooms and laboratories permits universities to function
with fewer full-fledged professors. Indeed, “the same dynamics that have made
graduate students such a good buy while they are in school have made them
increasingly unemployable after they complete their degrees,” noted Lafer in a
2003 essay that is perhaps even more relevant today. “The wholesale substitution
of casual teachers for tenure-track positions has marked the decimation of the
academic job market.” In 2015, there were 370,710 graduate student employees
but only 134,153 tenure-track faculty members, the former number having risen
16.7% and the latter having fallen 1.3% in the preceding decade, the Economic
Policy Institute study reports.
Given the facts of
university economics and the current academic job market, the old system
appears gone forever. Many faculty members are humane, well-meaning people who
had no part in creating the current situation, but it does not change that
fact. Minimal decency would therefore seem to require that universities
acknowledge this reality and recognize their graduate employees’ right to join
together and try to improve their resulting, unenviable lot.
source:
http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/06/push-graduate-student-unions-signals-deep-structural-shift-academia
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