GRADUATE TEACHING ASSISTANTS:

EXPLOITED LABOR ON AMERICA'S CAMPUSES

 

by Nick Gier, President, IFT Higher Education Council, AFT-AFL-CIO

nickgier@adelphia.net

 

An American Federation of Teachers policy statement on TAs can be found at www.aft.org/pubs-reports/higher_ed/grad_employee_standards.pdf.

 

Graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are responsible, on average, for 20 percent of all introductory courses on America's campuses.   At large public universities that percentage is as high as 42 percent. Their average salaries cover only 60 percent of basic living expenses, and only 36 percent has health insurance.  

 

These averages are skewed by the fact that Ivy League TAs make $25-30,000 a year with health insurance and tuition waivers; Washington State University (WSU) TAs start at $18,071 with health and tuition covered; Idaho State University TAs earn $15,334 ($18,130 for Ph.D. students) with the same benefits as above; and at the bottom is University of Idaho, whose TAs range from $5,400 in the humanities to $20,000 in the sciences, and they must pay in-state tuition and health insurance out of pocket.

 

One third of the American professoriate is now unionized, even though 19 states (Idaho included) still do not allow faculty to bargain collectively.  Unionization of TAs has been delayed primarily because their administrators have argued that they are students and not employees.

 

Clara Lovett, President of the American Association of Higher Education, states: "I used to think graduate students were apprentices learning scholarship and not employees in the normal sense of the word. But over the last 20 years or so, we have turned graduate students into a very significant and very underpaid part of the academic workforce."

 

Over the years courts have consistently agreed with Lovett, and they have ruled that TAs are indeed workers eligible for collective bargaining.  There are now about 70,000 graduate employees under union contract at 28 institutions.  Every major university in California, Oregon, and Washington (except WSU) now has graduate employee unions.

 

WSU graduate student leaders are now in the process of gathering signatures for what is called a "strong vote."  If they can get 70 percent of the students to authorize the United Autoworkers (UAW) as the bargaining agent, then an election, which requires only a 30 percent "show of interest," will not be necessary. The student organizers have chosen the UAW to represent them, primarily because it is the union for 4,000 TAs at the University of Washington. 

 

The bargaining unit is 1,700 employees, and student organizers say that well over 1,000 signatures have been submitted so far. It has been reported in the press that about 200 students have asked that their names be withdrawn.  They claim that union recruiters misled them, and they now say that they never intended to support the UAW.

 

Student critics want to know why the UAW was selected as the union, rather than the American Federation of Teachers or the National Education Association, which represent 335,000 faculty nation-wide and 40 percent of the unionized graduate assistants. The UAW has 49 percent of America's TAs under union contract, and they have been very successful in convincing graduate students that their 80 years' experience with collective bargaining is the main advantage they offer.  The UAW, calling itself "Uniting Academic Workers" on campuses, has also learned a lot about academic matters since it won the TA bargaining election at the University of California in 1992.

 

Critics say that collective bargaining would sour relations among graduate students, faculty, and administrators.  A 1999 study at five universities with unionized TAs found that this was not true. The respondents overwhelming agreed that "mentoring relationships, the free exchange of ideas, and the faculty advisory role had not suffered because of the unions."  This and other studies put the lie to a statement by the Republican-dominated National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that "there is a significant risk, even a strong likelihood, that the collective bargaining process will be detrimental to the educational process." Before the Bush administration came in, the NLRB had ruled in favor of unions at private universities.

 

The Moscow-Pullman Daily News has played up the critics of the WSU union efforts, and at the end of an April 15th article, a URL that promised a link to Washington's Public Employment Relations Commission was actually an anti-union website.  For balance I offered editor Steve McClure the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions at www.cgeu.org A Daily News editorial (April 25) also confused the 30 vs.70 percent rules, and was also incorrect in stating that a union contract would be signed by June.  Negotiations usually take months and would not be finished until Spring 2009.  America is known for its cultural illiteracy, but ignorance about labor history and relations is atrocious.

 

The editorial implied that WSU graduate employees could get the same results through their current campus organization.  This is not possible because this group cannot bargain for wages, benefits, and working conditions. For the same reason, the WSU Faculty Senate could not serve as a bargaining agent for faculty. The editorial also criticized the union leaders' pledge to work out student complaints on a case-to-case basis as not good enough.  This is puzzling, because one would be hard pressed to think of a more effective means of problem solving.

 

WSU administrators must be commended for not lobbying against bargaining legislation for graduate assistants.  Also to their credit is that they have not hired union busting agents to undermine the process.  For seven years TAs at New York University struggled against an entrenched administration before they got a contract in 2004; and Yale's TAs, after 12 long years, are still waiting, thanks to Bush's NLRB, for their administrators to recognize their union. Their efforts, however, are most likely the reason why the humanities TAs have received a $5,000 raise.

 

The right to bargain collectively is about dignity, respect, and self-determination.  Basically, it is representative democracy in the workplace. The greatest irony is that those who are responsible for preparing young people for life in a democracy society work in institutions that have been, before the onset of collective bargaining, thoroughly undemocratic.