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Fresh guidance for graduate employees
by Virginia Myers Kelly
It’s always exciting when workers begin to organize. A new demand for fair pay and decent working conditions is both a sigh of relief and a breath of hope that dedicated workers will, at last, be recognized and valued for their everyday efforts.
Imagine, then, that air of anticipation and committed resolve magnified by a national movement in October, when graduate employees at Ohio State University held a news conference simultaneously announcing plans to organize a union and to release a new AFT report on best practices for graduate workers. Recognition and Respect: Standards of Good Practice in the Employment of Graduate Employees, draws on the experience of thousands of union brethren and will provide just the framework a new organizing effort needs to succeed.
While Ohio State’s fledgling Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) begins testing interest in the union among the 4,800 graduate employees on campus, AFT and, by extension, its new publication already represent 150,000 college and university faculty and staff, including 16,000 graduate employees. The depth of its experience will no doubt inform GESO’s early efforts and those of many others both new to union activity and entering negotiations with years of experience as recognized locals.
The compelling issues, in either case, are clear: healthcare, tuition waivers and pay. Respect is paramount. Workload limits and appropriate training for graduate assistants given substantial responsibility for teaching, grading, research and administration are other primary concerns. Additional issues include retirement benefits and insurance, child care options, nondiscrimination, supervision, job security and equal representation in the union.
Equal pay for equal work
While GESO struggles with its initial organizing efforts, holding ice cream socials and drawing hungry grad workers with Tandoori chicken and the ubiquitous pizza at weekly informational forums, universities all over the nation are experiencing a similar need to address a burgeoning population of graduate workers. Following a trend away from fully tenured professors, graduate assistants join part-time, adjunct and nontenure track faculty in the entourage of teachers increasingly relied upon by universities for the hours they devote inside and outside the classroom. The National Center for Education Statistics shows that 44 percent of faculty are now part-time workers, and 62 percent make their academic living away from the tenure track.
The ranks of graduate employees increased 29 percent in the past decade. These workers weigh in at 260,000 strong and are responsible for large portions of academia. Among the professors and lecturers on campus, graduate workers teach 20 percent of introductory classes. At the largest research institutions, like the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where grad employees are represented by the Graduate Employees Organization/AFT, they teach a full 40 percent of all 100-level courses, and 22 percent of all undergraduate instructional units. Similarly, at the University of Florida, graduate employees (represented by the Graduate Assistants United/AFT) taught 42 percent of undergrad courses in 2002.
Despite their influence and sheer numbers, graduate workers often live at the margins of academia, considered more student than worker. A recent National Labor Relations Board decision drove that point home when it denied graduate employees at a private university the right to organize based on management’s argument that graduates are mainly students, not employees. But teaching is teaching. Recognizing one teacher as an employee and another as a student is, as the report points out, “simply untenable.”
“This is really about equal pay for equal work,” says Matt Williams, a geology graduate assistant at Ohio State. “We have a lot of grad students who are essentially being used as faculty lecturers.”
In addition to disparities among those who teach—i.e., full professors vs. graduate assistants—there are marked differences among the graduates themselves, from department to department and school to school. At Ohio State, Williams points out that the TAs in geology are “pretty well off,” obligated to supervise just three labs a week. In anthropology, however, TAs are expected to take on a full course, establishing texts and syllabus and teaching in the classroom. And the anthropologists are paid less than geologists.
This gulf between hard sciences and humanities exists elsewhere. Research lends prestige to disciplines often supported by science foundations, fellowships and even the U.S. Department of Defense. A Chronicle of Higher Education survey found predictable gaps, with substantial differences influenced by the state institution’s geographical area and its prestige. For example, one comparison showed a University of Memphis stipend of $8,500 for an English teaching assistant and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology stipend of $29,000 for an economics TA.
Unions make a difference; Williams says he came to Ohio State because he’d been offered a financial incentive. The University of Cincinnati, where he also was accepted as a graduate student, did not. “Ohio State is lucky that I didn’t apply to Michigan,” he says. “The package they would have offered me would have been far more competitive.”
Indeed, the University of Michigan, with one of the nation’s and the AFT’s oldest graduate employee unions, is a model for working conditions. The average stipend is $13,000 a year, plus full healthcare coverage, a child care subsidy and a mandatory orientation that includes a presentation on the union. “The driving principle has been that everybody should have access to higher education,” says Dave Dobbie, president of the Graduate Employees’ Organization/AFT (GEO) at Michigan. “It shouldn’t be something that you need a level of privilege to be around.”
Ensuring a living wage
Back at Ohio State, health subsidies ranked ninth among the Big Ten universities until last fall, when GESO petitioned the president of the university to change them. This quarter, the university will pay 64 percent of the graduate employees’ healthcare premiums; at Wisconsin, Michigan and Michigan State (where the AFT-affiliated unions represent graduate employees), and at Iowa, universities cover 90 percent to 100 percent.
Stipend is another primary issue at Ohio State and elsewhere. “You see inflation in everything—gas prices, rent, grocery bills—but the rate of your stipend is not increasing,” says Vijaykrishna Sivaramakrishna, a graduate employee at Ohio State. “There is a disproportionality.”
“The poverty wages are probably the most consistently and immediately felt issue,” says Mike Quieto, a grad employee at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Wisconsin boasts the oldest graduate employee union in the nation, the Teaching Assistants’ Association/ AFT, established in the late 1960s. Quieto is past co-president and current chair of the political education committee. But even there, where the union has negotiated extensive leave provisions and child care, conditions are not ideal. “Most of us are working second jobs. Despite the fact that we won free tuition ... we’re still taking out the maximum student loans that we can get [to pay living expenses]. A lot of us are living on revolving credit cards.” Wisconsin is operating close to the recommended standards, but the bar starts so low, says Quieto, “We’re still hurting. We’re paid so little we need to be getting really big raises. We’re barely able to tread water.”
While many new organizers turn to Wisconsin and Michigan as the standards for the industry—both universities offer free tuition, full health coverage, and, at Michigan, subsidized child care plus a half million dollars to expand access to child care on campus—AFT’s written standards will further legitimize their efforts. Organized into four sections, the booklet, available on AFT’s Web site, addresses compensation, employment practices such as nondiscriminatory hiring, workload and clear supervision; responsibility and support in the form of ongoing training and administrative assistance, academic freedom and intellectual property protection; and full rights within the union.
Such a guide, says Dobbie, of Michigan’s GEO, will give organizers a tool to help employees think about their work differently. “You can [help] folks ... imagine a better alternative, which I think is always a very powerful thing—to show people it can be real,” he says. One section of the report describes the strides unions have made for a number of campuses: Temple University Graduate Students’ Association/AFT secured salary increases of 13 percent to 22 percent in its first year. The Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation/AFT at the University of Oregon got a comprehensive health plan with prescriptions, dental and vision and an option to extend the program to family members. The Graduate Employees Union/AFT at Michigan State University bargained and won reasonable workload provisions and a seniority-based pay scale in its first contract. And the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants Association/AFT got additional salary for employees with off-campus or weekend assignments.
“I think it’s helpful to have graduate employees understand what the possibilities are for improvement,” says Tina Collins, member and political director of Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania/AFT (GET-UP). “A lot of people, when they enter any sort of job where they’re not working under ideal conditions, tend to take it for granted.” The standards will help them understand that “there are better ways of doing their jobs.”
Matt Williams, in Ohio, plans to use the new standards to convince graduate workers who believe they are consigned to be poor until they finish their studies that “it doesn’t have to be that way. These new standards are a quick and easy way that we can show them.”
Recognizing value
Getting the university, and even the graduates themselves, to identify as teachers and administrators, lab assistants and advisers instead of simply students, is the central goal. The bottom line is that grad assistants are employees. “Graduate teachers, tenured professors, adjuncts, we’re all doing pretty much the same work,” says Dobbie, who is working to “really get people to value the work that they’re doing. They’re doing teaching.”
Once that fact is established, the guidelines will be useful in negotiations. Quieto plans to distribute copies to the bargaining team during the next contract talks, to show what is fair and reasonable. At Penn, says Collins, administrators have “tried to argue that if we get a union here it will be the end of the world, that it will ruin graduate education. The more evidence we have that other excellent universities have had graduate unions for years, and many of them, like the University of Michigan, fulfill these kinds of higher standards, [the more we] emphasize the point that unions are a positive force on university campuses.”
And for those who already enjoy many of the suggested benefits, Recognition and Respect will be useful in obtaining others that are equally important to specific situations. One emerging trend is the reclassification of graduate employees, with their benefits in place, to adjunct faculty members or lecturers who may have less protection. Another issue in these security-conscious times is fair treatment for international graduate employees, who run into visa challenges and may be charged fees for SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System), a federally required program to track international students.
Working to give graduate employees more opportunity, to create a more livable environment for them as they toil as teachers, and to recognize the contributions they make to running universities, organizers see the advantage of adopting the recent standards for everyone. Says Quieto, “I feel strongly that because graduate students are such a vital part of the university working as a whole, that when you better compensate graduate students, you invite a better caliber of future graduate students.”
