Enthusiastic turnout for the February rally is easy to understand, says Rebecca Haines, TUGSA co-president. “Graduate employees are more and more coming to realize just how hard we work for what little pay,” she says. “Everyone likes to feel that their contribution is valued, and when you’re not given a strong package, it does send a message that you’re not important, you’re expendable.”

TUGSA is focusing on healthcare as costs continue to rise and salaries remain low. Some grad employees make $14,000 to $15,000; if they want health insurance for themselves and one dependent, it costs them almost a third of that salary, or $4,383, says Haines. While not all graduate employees have families, many do. “If we can secure better coverage for the people who are in that position, it will definitely improve quality of life,” she says.

Already, TUGSA has won a battle over summer benefits. Temple had denied graduate workers their health coverage over the course of three years, saying they were eligible only for nine months’ coverage. If employees worked over summer, they paid $298 out of pocket to cover themselves for those three months. TUGSA filed a grievance and an arbitrator ruled that Temple must refund that money to all teaching assistants and research assistants who worked over the summer and paid for their own summer benefits, retroactive to 2003.

Other issues on the negotiating table include maternity leave, continued cost-of-living increases, working conditions that might include office space, and fee waivers. Smaller issues have taken up a lot of time, however. The administration wants to sign off on things like the number of bulletin boards TUGSA can use to announce its meetings. And university officials haven’t signed off on how many TAs and RAs are in the bargaining unit.

As negotiations continue, TUGSA expects continued support from Temple undergrads. These students and others recognize the tremendous contribution of the graduate workers to the university, she says: “Temple works because we do.”

The AFL-CIO/NEA Labor Solidarity Partnership, unveiled Feb. 27 at the federation’s executive council meeting, and crafted in consultation with the AFT, establishes a procedure for affiliation that requires locals to apply through the NEA. Once approved, locals may participate in the AFL-CIO’s central labor councils and state affiliates.

The agreement is one of “several historic steps that bring fresh solidarity to the labor movement,” said AFL-CIO president John Sweeney. This includes more than 850 new “solidarity charters” for locals of international unions that last year disaffiliated with the AFL-CIO, as well as AFL-CIO affiliate charters for two new, previously independent unions: the 65,000-member United Transportation Union and the 10,000-member Farm Labor Organizing Committee.

Sweeney extended a special thanks to McElroy for his “active and creative role” in creating the Labor Solidarity Partnership, noting that the AFT president “sensed that the time was right” for bringing the NEA closer to labor. Currently, there are approximately 220,000 members in dual affiliates of the AFT and NEA.

NEA locals that win approval for affiliation from both the NEA and the AFL-CIO will gain the regular rights and responsibilities of affiliation, including union jurisdictional protections, representation and voting rights. The NEA is not affiliating with the AFL-CIO at the national level.

Members also were intrigued by a recent survey from the graduate workers union at Yale, showing increasing numbers of temporary workers in academia.

To investigate further, GET-UP published a report based on Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and U-Penn data. Looking at all undergraduate classes in the School of Arts and Sciences during fall 2005, GET-UP secretary Ciara Kehoe found significant casualization of labor: Large numbers of nontenure-track faculty (full-time and part-time lecturers, who are temporary instructors), adjuncts and graduate assistants teach many undergraduate courses. Graduate assistants teach 67 percent of the recitations, the smaller weekly discussion sections of large lecture courses, and 52 percent of the labs. And when it comes to classroom instruction, they teach 10 percent of the classes. Together with other nontenured faculty, they cover 60 percent of class instruction, while tenured and tenure-track faculty teach 40 percent.

These “nonladder” positions have little if any opportunity for advancement, job security or good benefits.

 “Recruiting top teacher-scholars requires a long-term commitment via tenure-track jobs,” concludes the study. “Reliance on temporary instructors weakens the quality of a university’s undergraduate education.”Adds Kehoe, “It’s part of the larger problem of corporatization of the university.”

“The long-term health of the AFT and its affiliates necessitates a much greater attention to organizing,” says AFT secretary-treasurer Nat LaCour, who chairs the organizing committee. He believes the plan will enhance the “culture of organizing” called for in the AFT’s 2000 “Futures II” report, and will help the AFT remain one of the fastest-growing unions in the labor movement.

At the heart of the systematic, strategic organizing plan is “a concerted, long-term vision to create a more active, educated, mobilized and involved membership that wants to participate in the union as part of a movement, not just an organization that provides services,” LaCour says.

Essential to the success of the plan is “a real partnership” with state and local affiliates and increased training opportunities for organizers, says Phil Kugler, assistant to the AFT president for organization and field services.

This is the first time in decades that the AFT has talked about rethinking its organizing strategies, Kugler says. “We have not looked to building organizing capacity in affiliates since the 1960s and 1970s” and the original fight for collective bargaining.

This revitalized focus on organizing, educating and mobilizing members is essential to countering an increasingly hostile environment that threatens the salaries, benefits and pensions of union and nonunion workers alike.

A successful organizing plan is expected to reap benefits in the political arena and make the AFT and its affiliates an even more forceful and influential voice on behalf of members and the institutions in which they work.

The carefully structured program builds on proven strategies for increasing membership, such as the AFT’s membership consolidation/internal organizing program, which targets the recruitment of employees that the union represents but who have yet to join the union. It also highlights the need to organize early childhood educators, charter school teachers, and part-time and adjunct higher education faculty.

The plan also recognizes the need to develop a new image and message to appeal to younger employees.

The AFT will be reaching out to state and local affiliates, asking them to buy into the plan by making organizing a larger part of their agendas, LaCour says. “We know the national AFT cannot do this alone.”