Members of the Alliance of Graduate Employee Locals (AGEL/AFT) met in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 10th for the first-ever conference of graduate employee unions to focus on professional issues.  The theme of the conference, "Graduate Employees and Undergraduate Teaching: Identifying Best Practices," was reflected in plenary sessions and workshops focusing on issues as diverse as classroom pedagogy, hiring and supervision, academic freedom and intellectual property.

"Our graduate employee unions are very geographically diffused from each other," Alyssa Picard, AGEL/AFT liaison and member of the Graduate Employees Organization at the University of Michigan, said.  "AGEL allows us to come together to form a network of support for one another.  Conferences like this let us discuss the issues facing graduate employees at many institutions."

Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York, kicked off the conference by emphasizing the need to provide more support to graduate employees, not only because they are the future of the academy but because of "their contribution to the academic level of the university" every day. 

The keynote speaker, Gordon Lafer, assistant professor, Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon and author of "Organizing Graduate Students," published by Dissent pamphlet magazine, spoke about a subject much on the minds of all higher academic employees these days: the growing trend on the part of college and university administrators to insist that academic courses and scholarly research produce financial profit.  Lafer maintained that the overuse and exploitation of graduate employees will increase as universities adopt a corporate model of programming.  "Universities are questioning why they should pay people to teach and do research in unpopular fields that don’t make them money," Lafer said.  "The only thing that has the hope of reversing this trend is the labor movement."

Throughout the day, attendees shared their methods for coping with the increase in graduate employee course load along with subsistence-level wages, little or no health care benefits and no guarantee of future employment.   "This was an energetic and empowering event for all of us," said David Kamper, lead organizer of the Graduate and Fixed Term Employee Organization (GFTEO) at Penn State University.  "It was wonderful to see all of the different things that graduate employee unions are doing right now to address the challenges of delivering quality education in today’s corporate university.  We all felt that this was a great first step toward making our universities better places to live, work and learn."

AGEL-AFT is an alliance composed of all graduate employee locals and organizing campaigns affiliated with the AFT dedicated to improving graduate employee working conditions and professional lives through unionization.  In 1995, this AFT-sponsored alliance formed with the mission of advancing the rights and unionization efforts of graduate employees at colleges and universities nationwide.  AFT currently represents over 16,000 graduate employees in 14 locals nationwide. [Brooke Boeglin]

[April 30, 2003]