PrintWhen your organizing committee takes just four weeks to sign up 400 people who will vote for the union, you know success is just around the corner. That’s what happened recently at Western Michigan University, where graduate employees turned out April 19 to vote 290 to 14 in favor of Teaching Assistants’ Union/AFT.
The issues driving the vote were job security, salary and health benefits. Amanda Bellino, a member of the organizing committee, decided she’d work to unionize when her international graduate employee colleagues in the Spanish Department almost went home due to lack of funds. Having a union would mean “another place you could go to help get through the bureaucracy.”
Bellino was also concerned over her own job: She has no contract, and could lose her assistantship if classes were underenrolled. After carefully choosing grad school over job offers she’d received right out of undergraduate school, when Bellino discovered this possibility, she says, “I felt betrayed.”
For TAU organizer Albert Barrese, the issue is health insurance. Afflicted with an ongoing medical condition, he ran out of prescription coverage for the year in April. He’s already paid $400 a month out of pocket. Barrese adds salary to the list of concerns as well.
Organizer Eric Gato cites the recognition a union would bring as the most compelling reason to organize. Despite an existing graduate student organization, administrators do as they please. “[It] doesn’t really have the power to fight for some of the things that really are important to us,” says Gato. Committees of graduate students advise administrators, Gato and others say, but administrators then “push their reports aside. ... I think the union would give us a chance to be able to have a voice.” With this election, all of the large public universities in Michigan are unionized.
The Penn State student charges the university with having a vague speech code that attempts to bar acts or words of “intolerance.” The Temple case is two-pronged. The student claims that two professors (both members of the Temple Association of University Professors/AFT) and the university president discriminated against him because of his military service and his support for the war in Iraq. He also is suing Temple on behalf of every student because of the university’s “vague and overbroad” anti-harassment policy.
The Temple lawsuit was filed by Christian DeJohn, a graduate student in Temple’s Master of Arts in Military and American History program and a sergeant in the Pennsylvania National Guard. It came one month after DeJohn testified during the public comments portion of a Pennsylvania Select Committee on Academic Freedom hearing held at Temple University (see cover story, March/April AFT On Campus).
At the Jan. 9 hearing, DeJohn complained about the difficulty he was having completing his master’s degree, blaming the Temple administration for snafus related to his military leaves of absence and blaming his teachers for requesting supplemental work. Behind it all, he said, was the History Department’s retaliation against him when he complained about receiving what he viewed as anti-war
e-mails while he was posted overseas.
His suit formalizes those claims against Temple University president David Adamany and two professors, Richard Immerman and Gregory Urwin, who, he says, have engaged in a “campaign of retribution and retaliation” against him, preventing him from graduating and interfering with his ability to get a job. Urwin, a highly regarded military historian and associate director of the Temple Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy (known as CENFAD), had served for a time as DeJohn’s master’s advisor. Immerman is History Department chair. The university is providing their legal defense, as is required by the TAUP contract.
Urwin and Immerman would not comment for this article because of the lawsuit. But in testimony rebutting DeJohn’s accusations before the select committee, Urwin laid out his professional credentials and extensive experience guiding civilian and military students’ education. He did not specifically address DeJohn’s academic challenges, citing the student’s confidentiality rights under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
Jay Lockenour, another associate director of CENFAD who coordinates the master’s history program, also submitted testimony pointing out that the offending e-mails were probably routine announcements and invitations to campus events, including a teach-in on the war. DeJohn’s name was removed from the routing list after he complained.
In addition to being filed on the same day in federal court, the two speech cases have something else in common. The students are being represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal ministry concerned, according to its Web site, with “religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and traditional family values.” The lead attorney on the cases is David French, who was president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education until December, when he resigned to serve his country, he said at the time. French provided lengthy testimony for the Pennsylvania Select Committee at its first hearing in Pittsburgh last fall.
To William Cutler, president of TAUP, the lawsuit is a predictable outcome of the legislative hearings and an example of the dangers posed by “Academic Bill of Rights”-type measures. One reason an ABOR bill failed in Florida, he points out, was the concern raised by university administrators and faculty that it would threaten institutions’ financial well-being by making them vulnerable to frivolous lawsuits. In this case, says Cutler, “DeJohn is someone with a bone to pick. French has an ideological point to make. It’s a marriage of convenience.”
It’s no wonder staff at Vermont College, a private institution, cast their lot with the AFT. These are people accustomed to being heard. They voice their opinions at Vermont town meetings, expect to have input in policymaking and rely on collaboration to get things done. When Union Institute, based in Cincinnati, came in with a new president and a corporate, top-down management style, the culture clash was inevitable.
Union Institute managers spoke of “open, honest communication,” but when it came to really listening and acting on staff input, they turned a deaf ear, says Anne Connor, director of the Academic Support Network, Vermont College, and a leader in the movement to organize.
When a conversion to paid time off was implemented, for example, it was presented as a fait accompli. “They’ve just completely changed things without any kind of input,” explains Connor, adding that as a result, all employees lost six sick days. There is also a new policy that nonsalaried staff must clock in and out in the morning, at lunch and at the end of the day, within a five-minute window—a dramatic cultural change from the days of flex time. “It undermines a sense of trust that existed before,” says Connor.
Staff are also upset that a personnel policy manual, which they’d attempted to rewrite over the course of several years only to be “shot down” by the administration, was rewritten by the new head of human resources without regard to the previous work of staff leaders.
Other issues that are sure to be addressed include salary, though this is not the top priority, says Connor. “We haven’t had a raise in three years,” she admits. “But that’s not at the top of our agenda. We’re watching decisions be made that are bad for the institution and we’re unable to have any effect.”
It was clear from the beginning that the union vote would succeed, as 71 percent of eligible staff signed cards indicating they wanted a vote. The final vote involved 82 percent of the 45-person unit.
When staff go to the bargaining table, says Jamie Kline, an active organizer in the undergraduate program, they go as academics. As she told the local paper, Kline explains, that means "we’re thinking about the three R’s: respect, respect, respect.”
