When Kat McLellan was accepted by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s doctorate in English program, she also was offered the option to teach undergraduate courses. She eagerly took the position because it was a steppingstone to a teaching career.
But the 19 hours per week that she agreed to spend working as a teaching assistant regularly overflows to as many as 30 hours–a situation not uncommon among graduate assistants nationwide.
Graduate students at colleges and universities often teach as much as 45 percent of the undergraduate teaching hours, said Perry Robinson, deputy director of the Higher Education Department for the American Federation of Teachers in Washington, D.C. At some campuses that percentage is higher.
There teaching assistants typically receive a stipend to work a set number of hours and sometimes a tuition waiver. However, many of these students across the nation are mobilizing to fight for collective-bargaining rights, particularly on the issues of working longer hours without extra pay, health insurance and a standard grievance procedure. Other graduate students who work as research and office assistants, graders and tutors have joined the fight.
McLellan, 27, is a paid organizer and one of 300 graduate assistants at UIC who are part of the Graduate Employees’ Organization. The group seeks to create a recognized collective-bargaining unit.
Graduate-employee unions are in place at 24 U.S. colleges and universities. Students at another 10 to 15 campuses are actively working to form unions.
This movement has gained momentum over the last decade, partly because of recent successful union bids by schools including the eight campuses in the University of California system. Educators and students also attribute the increased interest in unionizing to a growing national labor movement and changes in the academic profession.
“Over the last decade, the amount of activism has increased,” said Michael Stewart, an organizer for the Graduate Employees’ Association at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“A lot is spurred on by the teaching and research loads and the fact that much more work has been pushed onto graduate employees. Also, [the number of] tenure-track positions [has] gone down, and the work is being pushed onto adjunct and part-time faculty,” said Stewart, who is employed by the Illinois Federation of Teachers. The federation provides funds and assistance to help students organize.
“There’s more work being done by casual employees, and we have to make sure those are good jobs,” said Christian Sweeney, president of the UAW Local 2865, which is the union representing the academic student employees at the University of California.
“It’s a national movement because of the nature of the labor movement today. The labor movement is seeking to recruit more members among white-collar jobs,” said Catharine Stimpson, dean of the graduate school of arts and science at New York University in New York City.
Gaining recognition as a collective-bargaining unit may be just half the battle for students. University of California students fought 17 years to win collective-bargaining rights and finally won approval to unionize from the Employment Labor Relations Board in December 1998.
But the road to sealing a contract was rocky. Before resolving a contract in spring, students held a one-day strike and filed with the labor relations board more than 160 unfair labor practice grievances against the university. The 2000-2001 academic year will mark the first full school year with a union contract.
Teaching assistants make up the majority of the California students’ bargaining unit. Those students comprise about 10,000 people among the eight campuses, and they do 60 percent of the undergraduate teaching in the system, said Sweeney, who is working on his doctorate in history at the University of California at Berkeley. After students gained union recognition they won the right to a full tuition waiver, he said.
Administrators who are against graduate-employee unions often are wary of introducing an industrial bargaining model into academia. In fact, national labor organizations such as the United Auto Workers and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America are helping graduate students organize.
“It’s the industrial model imposed on academic life, and I have problems with that,” Stimpson said. The NYU graduate-employees union is backed by the auto workers union.
A third-party arbitrator is “not usually sensitive to academic culture,” said Bill Murphy, associate chair for public affairs at the University of Illinois. “The entire mechanism is set up for a factory culture. Our mechanism encourages amicable person-to-person working out of issues.
“In our view, faculty ought to be making decisions about the undergraduate experience.”
Drawing a line between students and employees is a key sticking point between the pro- and anti-union stances. Students do not have the right to unionize.
Stimpson, like many other administrators against unionization, said teaching is part of a graduate student’s education.
“What they do fits in with the overall education program,” Stimpson said.
“Graduate assistants are students on financial aid, not workers.”
Murphy also said that the U. of I. works to provide good benefits for its graduate students because it is competing for the best students.
“You want to do the most you can for [students] because otherwise you won’t get the best crop,” he said.
Some educators are concerned that a union would disrupt the collegiality between faculty and students and prefer to use existing grievance procedures to work out issues, administrators said. Other faculty members welcome another mode to express grievances.
“A student could be out striking against [a faculty member],” said Judith Kegan Gardiner, a professor of English and of Gender and Women Studies at UIC. “But it’s not the faculty students would be organizing against, it’s the administration. Unions want better hours, better benefits.”
Many graduate assistants say the jobs they do should be recognized as work.
“I love teaching, but it’s actual work and it should be acknowledged as work,” said Kimberly Johnson, 27, who is studying for her doctorate in American Studies at NYU.
“We are workers and we want a union,” said Liz DiNenno, 30, a member of the Graduate Student Association at Temple University in Philadelphia. DiNenno, who is working toward a doctorate in sociology, said she is under contract to work 20 hours a week as a teaching assistant but often works 30 to 40 hours. She also has taken on second jobs to make ends meet.
It’s often hard to teach and work on a doctorate, students said. Students typically teach one or two classes a semester or a discussion course for a lecture taught by the professor. Creating a syllabus, grading papers, preparing and administering exams and holding office hours are common job requirements.
Kate Bullard, 26, is working toward a doctorate in history at U. of I. She leads discussion groups for a large lecture course. She is responsible for 90 students and grading assignments. She wants the university to cap class sizes and teaching loads.
“It’s hard to do [the work],” said Bullard, who is co-president of the university’s graduate-employees union. “I’m also taking classes and writing a dissertation. At some point you have to say, `I would like to do this interesting lesson plan, but it would take too long to do the research.'”
Graduate students are not required to teach. It typically is offered as part of a fellowship or financial aid package.
“Usually graduate employees who are teaching assistants do it because it’s a job and they need money and it’s available to them at the university,” said Stewart of U. of I.
The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s graduate-employees union formed in 1973 and is the second-oldest in the country, after the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Wisconsin teaching assistants formed a union in 1966.
Alyssa Picard, who is working on her doctorate in history at Michigan, said she did not apply to Michigan because it had a union, but she is grateful it exists.
“I’m scared that I didn’t know what the difference would be without a union,” she said, referring to benefits that include annual pay increases and a cap on class sizes.
But having a union is not all roses, said Picard, who is the grievance chair for Michigan’s Graduate Employees Organization.
“It’s a constant fight,” she said, as students battle advisers over hours worked and class sizes.
Unions also serve as a vehicle to promote student fellowship, Picard said.
“Unions provide a great social community. It’s a supportive environment for graduate students to commiserate and support each other to finish” their degrees, she said.
Sweeney of Berkeley also notices a graduate-student camaraderie.
“The contract built solidarity across academic departments,” he said. “Students have been involved in organizing and striking, and it changed the feel of things. That solidarity has been great.”
Union organizers nationwide are keeping their eye on NYU, since it could become the country’s first private university to recognize a graduate-employees union.
The university’s graduate teaching assistants won a ruling in April by the National Labor Relations Board that recognized them as employees, giving them the right to unionize. It was a first for federal labor law, which governs private-sector bargaining. All existing graduate student unions are in public universities. Students held an election, but the ballots are impounded pending an appeal by the university.
NYU administrators now grapple with the realization that they could set a precedent for all private universities, Stimpson said.
The New York ruling is “a shot in the arm and a revitalization of the labor movement in general,” Sweeney said.
Graduate assistant unions are a way of “drawing attention to changes in the teaching profession,” said Kegan Gardiner of UIC. “Many teachers don’t get stable conditions and a living wage. Joining together for group representation is better than [fighting] alone.”
