I got an email from a reader on an organizing effort he’s involved in at the University of Michigan. I read through all the information he provided.
I’m pressed for time this morning, and it looks like this is going forward today, so what follows is his story, edited by me:
Currently, Graduate Student Research Assistants aren’t unionized (they generally work in the hard sciences in labs). They were a part of the bargaining unit but were kicked out in 1980 by an administrative ruling from the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC) that said that they weren’t employees.
In April 2011, after a four-month card-collection drive, more than 1,200 GSRAs – 55 percent of the roughly 2,200 RAs employed at UM – signed cards and petitioned MERC to demand a union election. We had a roughly 75 percent sign up rate of the RAs were could actually find.
Initially UM administrators, ferociously opposed the effort, but were overruled by the elected Board of Regents in May 2011.
Despite the Regents’ vote, many faculty members and administrators continued to openly oppose the GSRA union drive, claiming that it would somehow disrupt the sacred magical “mentor-mentee” relationship between advisor and advisee. Oddly, for scientists and scholars, logic seemed in short supply For an example, see this fine example from an associate Dean in the College of Engineering.
Notice how he doesn’t cite any empirical evidence for his claims.
And for a response see here.
For Henry Farrell’s marvelous takedown of the academic arguments against unionization see here.
Meanwhile, In August 2011, as these issues were heating up, and MERC began reviewing its 1981 ruling, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy – our state JV associate of the American Legislative Exchange Council — jumped in to “represent” a GSRA who didn’t want a union and started screaming about “forced unionization” and attempting to interfere in the MERC hearing process.
Then, our lovely right-wing attorney general took a break from his crusade against recreational pot users to jump into the party and spend taxpayer dollars trying to stop a union election.
MERC threw out both the AG and the Mackinac Center’s complaints (as did other courts), opened a formal review of its 1981 ruling and ordered an non-partisan administrative law judge to conduct a fact-finding hearing, which took place this month.
Now here’s where it gets really interesting. About a week and a half ago, the administrative hearing was concluding and less than a month before MERC would issue its ruling on whether or not GSRAs were employees in addition to being students, and therefore having rights to form a union under PERA. Suddenly the leader of the Michigan State Senate, Randy Richardville, introduces a bill (0971) that would redefine PERA to explicitly state that GSRAs are not employees. He claims that he met with a few GSRAs who didn’t want to be unionized, and was moved by their plight. Of course, he never met with any of the 1,200 GSRAs who signed cards supporting a union and who want a fair election.
Anyhow, the bill flew through committee and passed out of the State Senate in two days, which is the quickest it has moved on anything in living memory.
The bill is now before the House and slated for hearings on this Wednesday, March 1. No doubt it will be expedited.
We are pressing as hard as we can to stop this bill, though we don’t have much hope. We’re just trying to make the GOP do this in broad daylight instead of quietly. (Have I mentioned this week is UM’s Spring Break?)
Here’s a partial list of GOP reps in vulnerable districts we’re targeting, plus the speaker. We need 12 total to flip, which is a tall order.
Mark Ouimet (R) District 52 (517) 373-0828
Rick Olsen (R) District 55 (888) 345-2849
Pat Somerville (R) District 23 (517) 373-0855
Nancy Jenkins (R) District 55 (855) 292-0002
Kevin Cotter (R) District 99 (517) 373-1789
Jase Bolger (R) District 63 (Speaker) (517) 373-1787We’re also trying to put pressure on Gov. Snyder.
Just to be clear – we all respect the rights of RAs who don’t want a union to vote “no” in a fair election. We also recognize that the university administration would have legitimate interests to protect at the bargaining table. But it’s undemocratic, unfair and underhanded to express these concerns by short circuiting an established administrative process and taking away choice on whether or not to form a union.
This is the union site, where there’s a good run-down of the whole saga. If you’re in Michigan and sympathetic to our reader’s cause, help him out and make some phone calls.
Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) at the University of Michigan
GEO represents graduate student instructors (GSIs) and graduate student staff assistants (GSSAs) at the University of Michigan.
samara morgan
lol.
there will be no disruption of the master/slave relationship between grad students/RAs/TAs and the mighty professortariat.
i’ve had to house sit, baby sit and assemble IKEA furniture as a grad student.
c u n d gulag
Maybe if they also did some janitorial work, they’d be allowed to unionize?
No, because that would set a precedent, and the HS, JHS, and grade school kids, would also have to be allowed to unionize.
Soonergrunt
Speaking of unions, it looks like my union, the American Federation of Government Employees won a couple for our members recently.
First, Physicians have been returned to the collective bargaining units in the VA system.
Second, and I don’t have the final report yet, it looks like our Local won a pretty substantial tactical victory in our dispute with management at OKC VAMC, with the Labor/Management committee from VA HQ substantiating the majority of our grievances, and ordering changes in OKC VAMC policies and procedures to comport with VA policy and federal employment law, which is all we demanded.
superdestroyer
I find it odd that the Obama Administration is talking about making college more affordable while the progressives in Michigan are trying to make it more expensive.
Walker
I know it is not the same everywhere, but grad students in my department are not paid cheaply. When you include the tuition bill and benefits, a grad student costs one of our grants almost more than a post-doc. And we pay our post-docs more than assistants get at teaching institution.
Guster
@superdestroyer: I find it odd that my wife liked Infinite Jest. I think David Foster Wallace was brilliant, in some ways, but in dire need of editing. He always claimed that he wasn’t _trying_ to make the book inaccessible, but really just the first 50 pages disproves that completely. I suppose he’s going for a certain effect, of repetitive and obsessive meaninglessness, but … there are better ways.
And did he really have a black character speaking in incredibly heavy-handed _dialect_?
R-Jud
@samara morgan: My sister kept getting asked to dog-sit, even though she’s allergic.
kay
@superdestroyer:
I find it odd that conservative think tank always go after the lowest level employees in any entity or field or business.
Actually, I don’t find it odd. It’s a constant. One of those “principles” we’re always hearing about.
ant
any “official” press covering this story at all?
Guster
Oh, and what can those GSRAs do? I absolutely know that this is easy for me to say, but if they’re valuable and committed, then they’ve got leverage even if the state senate is screwing with them.
I’m not saying they need to strike. But I’m sure there are some clever ways to make their displeasure, and their worth, very clear.
R-Jud
@kay:
They’re those greedy special interests we keep hearing about.
rea
@superdestroyer: the Obama Administration is talking about making college more affordable while the progressives in Michigan are trying to make it more expensive
RA pay is hardly the reason university tuition is so expensive. I’m a ’78 grad of U. of Michigan Law. Present tuition is ten times what I paid, in constant dollars. Oh, and there are no RAs in the law school.
kay
@Guster:
I agree that there may be other ways, but he’s simply asking that they follow the established process.
It looks to me like the big hitters saw this not going their way under that process, so called in the think tank/round table crowd.
Walker
@superdestroyer:
Graduate research assistants are covered by grants, not tuition. Universities are very careful about keeping this budgeting separate (partly so that they can maximize grant revenue).
kay
@R-Jud:
Hah! “Why do they find working people so offensive?”
danielx
Right. Mustn’t disturb the rights of the profs to have RAs pick up their dry cleaning, etc etc.
Nicole
They say our day is over; they say our time is through.
They say you need no union if your collar isn’t blue.
But that is just a lie that the boss will say to you
For the union makes us strong.
el donaldo
Oh, I see. Graduate students working as RAs or TAs get taxable compensation both as pay and as tuition exemption and, in most cases, some kind of benefit plan, but they’re NOT employees. They’re mentees.
Wait for that kind of logic to start spreading to other areas of the workforce.
Bobby Thomson
Mark Ouimet, eh? He’s a tool.
localcomment
I’ve lived both sides of the fence, graduate student and professor. Grad students in the sciences are paid a stipend (for either teaching or research or both), get health care, and have their tuition paid for. Yes they don’t make much money, and sometimes have to work really hard, but they also are getting a free education. I have to write grants to support my students and grant funding has been a diminishing commodity with all the state and federal cutbacks. If unionization makes it more expensive to take on graduate students, I’ll have to take on fewer or replace them with post-docs. Graduate students are in an unique employment situation and should not be equated with other jobs, because it is not a job. Yes, there are faculty who undoubtedly abuse the system and there should be severe consequences for them, but if you want to do research, you ought to be prepared to work long and sometimes inconvenient hours. I think the organizers of this have not thought through what some of the unintended consequences might be.
rikryah
kay,
please keep on issues like this. I try and spread the knowledge that you give
Guster
@kay: Yeah, I think you’re completely right. It’s just … the right always does this. If they have power, they use it. If they’re not willing in one process, they’ll find a way to circumvent it. Meanwhile, we won these battles 70 years ago, by _not_ going through the established channels. By a whole lot of impolite behavior–like strikes–and now we’ve internalized that the proper processes are … proper.
Easy for me to say, of course.
It’s one think I’ve always wanted to know about labor history. How and when unions, some unions, traded away the ability to strike. And what that even means.
El Cid
@superdestroyer:
I know, right? The question is why can’t we pay professors like graduate assistants, and make all the costs come down, rather than pay those graduates more?
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
Good on the people protesting here. I’m just worried it’s not going to be enough. Between this:
And the fact that the leaders in the state leg. have shown that they listen to the public only when it can pick and choose which part of the ‘public’ it listens to to justify things, it makes me feel like the fix is already set. And that’s just fucking stunning to me. Seriously, a bill going through committee and Senate in two days? With all the economic bullshit and crisis the state’s going through, they super-fucking-expedite something like this? AND it’ll probably pass with flying fucking colors because the GOP owns it all there?
Pee Cee
@c u n d gulag:
Well, if you count at the prof’s house, then some of them do janitorial work.
El Cid
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: Smash & grab. Don’t let bills hang around long enough to be debated or reported on or to draw too much citizen involvement. Smash & grab.
Marc
On the actual topic at hand – yes, it’s dirty pool to prevent people from voting for a union if they want to.
It is worth pointing out that we’re talking about graduate students here, not long-term employees. This doesn’t mean that they can’t have legitimate issues about wages and working conditions. But it does mean that the factory floor union model isn’t necessarily the best guide as to what to do.
To put it bluntly, I’m seeing a lot of lazy stereotyping here about the student-professor relationship. Graduate students are most concerned about starting their careers, getting good jobs when they graduate, and getting degrees. We talk with students in our (non-Michigan) university about things that matter to them frequently, and wages (etc.) aren’t even on the radar. Salaries of 24K/ year are not princely, but being paid (and not paying tuition) to learn a craft for 5 years isn’t a terrible gig either.
The reason why a lot of academics are very suspicious of the union model for science students is that there are real issues related to graduate students being *students* – e.g. you’re judging their ability to get a doctorate and do original research, not having them build cars. Science is not a 9-5 job – you put in long hours for doing something that you really enjoy and not having a boss. Union rules about working hours would put people in the odd position of having students working less than the professors. (Would an undergraduate union demanding that students not have to spend more than 40 hours a week studying or being in class be a good idea?)
You could design a union model focused on benefits, wages, and reasonable treatment of employees. You could also design a union that badly screwed up student – adviser relations and disrupted graduate education. It’s not an automatic tribal thing.
Walker
@Marc:
Exactly.
Cacti
It’s depressing to see how many “liberals” these days have their default switch set in the pro-management position.
Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on?
Nicole
@Marc: It’s a gross generalization to assume that any union contract is a factory floor template. Union demands will, by necessity, vary according to what the needs of the particular employees are. From reading the links Kay provided, it looks like the RA concerns are much more connected about access to faculty than salary.
It’s a monumental hassle to form a union. People aren’t going to do it unless they really feel there is a need for it. And that need often has nothing to do with money. As the old song goes, bread and roses.
Steve
It’s awfully predictable how the worker who doesn’t want to unionize is always used as a stalking-horse for the anti-union interests of the employer. You saw this with the card check debate, too. No one sheds a tear for the employer who doesn’t want to bargain fairly with his employees, so instead the employer always says, “What about that poor guy over there who doesn’t want to pay union dues? I just think it’s so terrible that you want to force him to pay union dues.”
AA+ Bonds
Been rocking my GEO shirt lately- y’all hear about that UM young engineer whose lab head harassed her over organizing work and then tried to ban her from ALL extracurricular activities?
Nicole
@Guster:
Usually, it was not the unions’ choice; the state passed laws forbidding certain unions from striking. The last time the MTA went on strike here in NYC, it was against the law. I think they ended up having to pay a fine or something. So, while they may still strike, there will be consequences.
Of course, compared to the 1930’s and earlier, when the consequences included being shot at by a police force that was in the pocket of the businesses, a fine isn’t really any big deal.
Rafer Janders
@localcomment:
Graduate students are in an unique employment situation and should not be equated with other jobs, because it is not a job.
So if it’s not a job, they can show up or not show up as they choose, set their own hours at their convenience and no one else’s, not do any work at all if they feel like it, etc. Correct? Because that’s what not having a job means.
AA+ Bonds
Of course, where they really need it is at UNC back home, where it’s illegal under state law.
Samara is spot on about the professoriat: like bossed in every other collectively fucked field in the U.S., those who have landed rare positions in academia reward themselves through joyous sadism toward those who follow in their path
AA+ Bonds
See: sigh-emitting fascists like localcomment, who are just filled with regret that “tough times” mean they have to oppress their workers (nothing like all those bosses in the private sector, no sirree)
Butch
Mackinac has been pushing for a “right to work” (anti-union) law for a while now.
AA+ Bonds
The very fact that US grad students in ENGINEERING(!) are pushing for a union means their backs are against the wall
AA+ Bonds
What this comes down to is anger by academics that those who follow them might have a chance at being treated more fairly than those academics were in their youth- and it is especially grating that it shows what pushovers those old profs were as grad-slaves
Paul in KY
Don’t they make good fudge?
Edit: I’m sure the staff (lower ones) at The Grand Hotel are members of SEIU. Maybe they could join that union?
Chris
@Guster:
But somehow never for good. It’s always to make life harder for someone lower on the food chain.
Those guys could use the Schindler pep talk about having the power to hurt someone and not using it.
Yevgraf
For those who wonder why tuitions are so high, understand that every fucking time some grandstanding, needs-to-be-beheaded-while-his-entire-extended-family-is-put-to-hard-labor-on-a-collective-farm plutocrat applies his low taxed dollars for a deduction by endowing a university building or program, a truckload of money is then required by the university to sustain the ancillary costs of the thing.
The G. Mortimer Gottrocks III Research Lab will need utilities, TAs, nontenured professors, equipment, chairs, desks, pencils, janitors, maintenance people and admin staff.
Those “gifts” have cost the rest of us mightily.
Rafer Janders
@Marc:
Salaries of 24K/ year are not princely, but being paid (and not paying tuition) to learn a craft for 5 years isn’t a terrible gig either.
I think this is an unfortunate line of reasoning, one that I’m sure employers would love to use for any lower-level job if they could (and that is already being used to justify paying interns nothing). There are many, many cases where employers could justify cutting wages on the grounds that the workers are really “learning a craft” and so don’t deserve to be compensated fair market wages for their labor.
Why couldn’t this also be applied to factory workers? Truck drivers? Lawyers? IT professionals? Cops and firefighters? Research analysts? Journalists? Steelworkers? Janitors? Legislative aides? Secretaries? High school teachers? Soldiers? Bank clerks? Accountants? Architects? Engineers? For the first five years of any job, let’s just say they are still “learning their craft” and so aren’t “real” employees.
Interrobang
Here in the jolly old Province of Ontario, for a while it was looking as though temporary and adjunct faculty at community colleges were going to organise, so the neocon government at the time promptly passed a law making that impossible. Frankly, I think that’s in contravention of our national labour laws, but I’m bringing it up to say that if there’s a way they can prevent easily-exploited workers from organising, they’ll do it in a heartbeat.
One of the issues in that particular union debate was whether that segment of the staff would be paid for non-class time. Considering that most post-secondary faculty spend at least 3x more time working outside of class (ie. prep work, reading, office hours, and marking) than they do in class (lectures), this was a big issue.
I also seriously doubt it’d make things that much more expensive. (And yes, having been there, although in the humanities, not the sciences, being a graduate student is a job; you just have to go to classes besides.)
Rafer Janders
@localcomment:
Graduate students are in an unique employment situation and should not be equated with other jobs, because it is not a job.
To my mind, if you are performing regular labor in exchange for regular compensation, and if you won’t get that compensation anymore if you stop the labor, then it’s a job.
Marc
@AA+ Bonds:
I guess that it can’t possibly be the case that there are any potential problems with forming a union under any circumstances. It’s a tribal thing – we’re supposed to shut off all critical thought and cheer for team blue.
Students in a small department can deal directly with the professors. Or you can be part of a very large union, dealing with very different concerns in very different departments. There are other dimensions besides union/nonunion – like whether the issues faced by engineers are the same as those faced by geologists.
Student unions have historically been very unpopular among graduate students in the sciences. Unionization drives at Yale and Cornell failed in the face of overwhelming resistance from them; Yale got a union only by separating the humanities from the sciences.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a union, of course. It does mean that it’s been done badly in the past, and that you have to be very specific about what your goals and approaches are.
Steve
@Marc: My proposal would be to let the actual employees decide whether it would be in their best interests to form a union and, if so, whether it would be in their interests to be part of a much bigger union. Perhaps they could decide this by majority vote?
The anti-union forces aren’t simply making an argument that a union might not always be in everyone’s interests, they want to take the choice away altogether. Hey, do it if you can get away with it, but don’t bullshit everyone by saying you’re doing it for the workers’ own good. I guess these employees aren’t smart enough to know their own best interests.
Marc
@Rafer Janders:
Graduate students in the sciences do not self-identify wages as an issue. They care much more about whether they’re being prepared for a career. In my field virtually all graduates get postdoctoral research positions paying an average of 55K/ year, typically for 5 years. About 20% end up as professors,40% end up doing long-term research in the field, and 40% leave the field. The people who leave the field have higher average salaries than those who stay.
Graduate school is a transitional stage in a career, and this has to affect the salaries. Student stipends are paid for by grants, and raising student salaries is entirely possible if people are willing to increase budgets for grant funding. If you raise student salaries too much it becomes more cost-effective to hire postdocs (who are already trained, and much more efficient than students who are learning how to do science.) This has poor long term consequences for training.
Marc
@Steve:
I completely agree with you. Banning unionization is a sign that you simply don’t care about what the people in question think.
Jeff Boatright
@Marc: I’m a professor in life sciences and I completely agree. I’m just one guy with limited experience, so take the following with a big grain of salt:
Graduate students are students heading into a profession. Period. The work is going to be long and hard and nobody owes them even a “thank you” at the end of the day. They are there to develop THEIR careers. If they feel they’re being abused, they need to take it up with the bazillion deans and assistant deans and committees and counselors available at their institutions. There are entire offices devoted to protecting the students’ interests. At the departmental or division level, there is at least a committee and a director of graduate students there to protect the students’ interests. We’re not talking about a group of workers that has no recourse or resources. We’re talking about an elite student body that already has resources most union workers might be green with envy over.
When I was a grad student, there was exactly ONE instance of ‘worker’ student abuse in our dept. The faculty member was fired within weeks of being reported. I’m not saying that labor abuse doesn’t happen, but in my 25 years since in the field, I have only seen this one instance. That’s not to say that there aren’t puh-lenty of unhappy grad students, but again, in my experience, their happiness is not due to labor issues.
And yes, Rafer Janders, it’s not a job, but there are consequences to being lazy, or disorganized, or slow. Just like any undergraduate or professional school student, a graduate student doesn’t ‘have’ to show up in the classroom or in the lab. But hey, you skip classes and fail to keep a B average? You fail and are kicked out of the program. Blow off your dissertation work and never publish? You fail and get kicked out of the program.
TB
It is extremely important to keep in mind some key distinctions here. Unions, in my view, are a key mechanism for balancing labor and management interests – otherwise management holds all the cards. However, the professor/grad student relationship is NOT (unless it is pathological) a management/labor relationship. A student on a GSRA is not being paid to perform work for the professor; a science or engineering student is most definitely not a technician carrying out bench tasks under an employer’s direction. Again, if that is in fact the case, then the relationship is pathological and not serving the true purpose of research training.
A student on a GSRA is being paid to do the research they need to do to get a PhD. It is really more like a fellowship – you get paid to get an education! Again this is totally different from being supported as a GSI (grad student instructor); in many fields, there are not grants available to support the PhD research directly, so the student must support him or herself in some other way, and a GSI is clearly labor working for en employer. Unions are perfectly appropriate in the GSI case.
The problem with unionization for GSRA’a is that it turns what should NOT be an employer/employee relationship into one.
I am an engineering professor, and I do see the occasional faculty member who does treat students as employees, and in that case I think there are ways the university can correct that. For all the really successful PhD mentors, however (and by that I mean professors who turn out students who are capable of launching successful independent research careers of their own), the whole point of the mentoring relationship is to turn students into independent thinkers who can make original discoveries of their own. Anyone who treats his or her students as employees, carrying out tasks spelled out in the work statement of a contract, is highly unlikely to consistently accomplish this.
The claim that the professor/grad student mentoring relationship is special is not management nonsense, but does need to be articulated clearly. The point should be to implement policies that will encourage the optimal relationship. The danger of GSRA unionization is that it will subvert the actual goal of PhD research training.
jonas
Having been on both sides of this issue (grad student/faculty), I think Marc above has a pretty good bead on what the faculty perspective is. But there’s another concern that I heard my own professors express when I was a grad student at a UC campus attempting to unionize: they viewed it as yet another way that intellectual work and the academy were becoming commodified and commercialized. First students become “customers” who demand high grades because they’ve “paid for them”, then TA’s become unionized workers, faculty are “management” and pretty soon the university is just another industry turning out widgets made by people who punch in at 9, punch out at 5 and won’t do X task because “it’s not in their job description.”
It’s not a particularly good argument, of course, but it’s what they’re thinking, even a lot of faculty who would readily support unionization in other industries.
Aaron S. Veenstra
Plenty of universities have grad assistant unions and are just fine. I got my PhD at one, and now I’m a professor at another. Grants are still received, research is still done, mentoring relationships still exist.
Pococurante
@Rafer Janders:
Actually this is a hot topic right now. Businesses don’t want to train up employees because they are concerned they will leave. A state sponsored program that covers some of the risk/cost to employers is a good thing.
You’re arguing for the status quo which keeps people from learning their way into a new trade/career and instead keeps them permanently under/unemployed. You call us taking the pro-management line, but I suggest we’re more pro-employee than your position.
Opposing any program because it might be abused is a classic example of Perfect being the enemy of Good.
Amir Khalid
I hate that word “mentee”. A mentor provides guidance and tutelage to a protege.
Tone In DC
Michigan has had SKY HIGH unemployment for over three years, and it would be worse without the Obama Administration’s bailout of the Big Three.
The state legislature has the damn time to fast track an anti-union bill, while Mchiganders are underwater on their mortgages and cannot find work?
end rant
Jeff Boatright
@jonas:
I agree that the concern about creating a 9-to-5 mentality is a weak argument, but maybe we’d disagree on why it’s a weak argument. The 9-to-5 mentality absolutely has grown in academia, though not from actions of students or post-docs. In my limited experience, university administrations have injected the corporate culture into academia to the point where deans are upper-management and chairs are considered lower-middle management (all those assistant deans must be middle-middle management!). Individual faculty are just a level of worker bee (though at a research university, pretty much the bee that brings in the pollen).
So, I don’t know that student unionization would create a 9-to-5 mentality for the simple reason that it may already exist. And that’s too bad, because somewhat like government, and for different reasons, academia should not be run like a business.
JoeShabadoo
This reminds me of people keeping NCAA players from making money because they are “students.” It doesn’t matter how much money they bring into the school or how valuable they are they are still just students so the school is free to screw them.
daveNYC
@Jeff Boatright: I don’t get the ‘not a job’ line. They get compensation in return for peforming certain duties, and if they don’t peform to a certain standard, then they lose that compensation. How exactly are we defining ‘job’ in such a way that that doesn’t count as one?
JoeShabadoo
@daveNYC: Its the same way that giving a student an unpaid internship is doing them a favor. It doesn’t matter that the person does very necessary work and still has to live in a big city with high expenses because that person is learning something. This makes the employers think of themselves as saints despite the exploitative relatioinship.
PeakVT
If they feel they’re being abused, they need to take it up with the bazillion deans and assistant deans and committees and counselors available at their institutions.
And, when they don’t feel like their concerns are being met, then they can form a union. Right?
jonas
@Jeff Boatright: that was just my point: academia as a 9-5 widget business is definitely coming from the top, not from student unionization efforts. Especially at the big public universities, the top administrative posts and trustee/regent positions are increasingly filled with politically well-connected business people committed to bringing business-style “efficiencies” to the university — efficiencies that apparently include huge seven-figure compensation packages in many instances.
I think grad students in many cases are in the same labor no-man’s land as corporate interns. You’re working temporarily to gain professional experience, not a paycheck. But you are doing *work* nonetheless. The people who really need, and deserve, a strong union in my opinion are the legions of over-worked, underpaid adjunct instructors who do the majority of teaching at many community colleges and public universities. Garry Trudeau did a series in Doonesbury some years back about Walden College switching to adjuncts, who were hired in a parking lot like day laborers and brought to campus in the back of a flat-bed truck. Not far from the truth.
Mnemosyne
I do find it fascinating how many faculty members here are insisting that TAs and GAs have nothing to complain about when we have a large group of them at UM, you know, complaining and trying to form a union.
Do you think maybe you could read the website and see what the specific complaints of the pro-union people are before you smugly say that there’s no possible way they could need a union? Maybe look at the evidence and the facts before you draw a conclusion that UM doesn’t need a union? You’re really making me worry about the quality of education you’re providing your students.
rea
If unionization makes it more expensive to take on graduate students, I’ll have to take on fewer or replace them with post-docs.
That would be an excellent point to make to the union’s bargaining committee in contract talks. Not a reason to block unionization, though.
Joe Max
UC Berkeley TAs and RAs are members of the United Auto Workers. Go figure.
JoeShabadoo
@Mnemosyne: A lot of people are prounion until the people that work for them unionize. They are such excellent bosses/employers/mentors that forming a union is just wrong.
Jeremiah
@Pococurante: Here’s a gross over-generalization with a healthy grain of truth: why, perchance, do employers worry so much about employee disloyalty? They didn’t used to, but then again, they used to demonstrate loyalty to their employees by funding pension plans, failing to fire people just because they are now old enough to be replaced by a younger person with far lower salary expectations, etc. It reminds me of the old saw that goes something like “the most suspicious people are the least trustworthy themselves.” Also, a thoughtfully designed CBA is not “the death of the enterprise” as anti-union folks claim; all it means is that those who formerly had all of the power in the relationship must now share, both power and profit. In commercial enterprises, for instance, the economic data suggests that (for a variety of reasons) union employees are more productive, ceteris paribus, than their non-union counterparts. Yes, profits do go down after unionization, but isn’t that the point? A more equitable distribution of the jointly created surplus between owners and employees, coupled with enforceable rights to dignity on the job? After all, with limited and difficult-to-enforce statutory exceptions for race, gender, etc., if you work in the U.S. and do not have union, you can be fired at will for any reason or no reason, or even a bad reason, so long as no valid statute specifically prohibits firing for that reason.
Barry
@Walker: “When you include the tuition bill and benefits, a grad student costs one of our grants almost more than a post-doc. And we pay our post-docs more than assistants get at teaching institution.”
The tuition is just wooden nickels. Almost no Ph.D. students actually pay full tuition, because nobody could.
Barry
@Guster: “Oh, and what can those GSRAs do? I absolutely know that this is easy for me to say, but if they’re valuable and committed, then they’ve got leverage even if the state senate is screwing with them.
I’m not saying they need to strike. But I’m sure there are some clever ways to make their displeasure, and their worth, very clear.”
Are you serious?
Barry
@Marc: IIRC, there was a ‘Marc’ over on Crooked Timber, with an amazing volume of posts opposing grad student unionization, with no good arguments whatsoever.
I only wish that knew Marc and localcomment’s full names, e-mails and university affiliations – not to harrass them, but to be able to send a hearty F************* YYYYYYYYYYYYOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the day that they get classified as ‘management’, and stripped of all protections. IIRC, at least one state is working on this.
Linnaeus
At my university, we’ve had both TAs and RAs under a collective bargaining agreement since 2004. I’m not an RA, but I know quite a few and I was until recently very involved with working for our ASE (academic student employee) union. To my knowledge, having unionized RAs hasn’t seriously impacted faculty-student relationships; the university administration has had no complaints in that department and neither have faculty on the whole. RAs make up a very significant portion of our membership and many of the concerns they had (and continue to have) are the same as other ASEs.
It’s understandable that some faculty would have concerns about that issue. During our unionization drive, some GSRAs did too. Our contract does take into account the fact that GSRAs’ work in their labs, in the field, etc. is also part of their academic program and so it’s still up to their faculty mentors to make the appropriate judgement as to whether or not the student is making acceptable academic progress.
And working as an ASE is a job. I don’t think being a student and being a worker is a mutually exclusive proposition. Yes, a GSRA is in training for a future career, but she/he is also doing work that advances the research program of her/his PI and the research mission of the university in general. So the student isn’t the only one benefiting here. I also don’t think it’s demeaning to be considered a worker, even in academia. All labor has dignity.
Jeff Boatright
@Mnemosyne: No, I think maybe you could make your argument here and see if it holds water.
Barry
@AA+ Bonds: “The very fact that US grad students in ENGINEERING are pushing for a union means their backs are against the wall”
Seconding this.
Barry
@Marc: Yes, this is the same Marc over there. He’s still not making a single argument that (1) could not be used in many, if not all jobs, (2) all of his arguments against unionization are BS and based on worst-case assumptions, and (3) he then switches to best-cases assumptions about how non-unionized students are treated.
Watch him on this, see if he doesn’t fulfill my predictions.
Barry
@Pococurante: “Opposing any program because it might be abused is a classic example of Perfect being the enemy of Good.”
Which applies at least as much to your opposition to unionization.
And we’re not doing that – frankly, you’re lying here. We support unionization because of actual, existing abuses.
Walker
@Barry:
You do not understand how PhD tuition works. Of course they do not pay it. No one does.
But it is not wooden nickels. The PI has to pay it to the university when they cover the student. It comes out of the grant that the PI secured outside of the university. At might institution, I can hire a grad student for 24k or a postdoc for 55k and it costs me the same amount of money to my grant.
Jeff Boatright
@jonas:I don’t entirely disagree, but if a graduate student’s activity is defined solely as “work”, then what differentiates a graduate student from a technician? Indeed, if I just want “work” to get done most efficiently on a project, I’ll have a technician do it. Why would I bother with all the extra feeding and care a student needs if all the student does is “work”? You know, other than I believe in the academy. ;)
As I posted previously, my experience is narrow and limited otherwise. Very few of the graduate students in our group are TAs or RAs, and that’s a “work product” distinction I hadn’t been taking into account. In fact, only one that I’m aware of, and that person wanted the teaching responsibility because he wanted to focus on teaching rather than research as a career choice. Thus, my perspective is apparently very skewed compared to some on this thread. There is some continuum from “worker-only” to “student-only” maybe, and each student falls somewhere on that continuum?
FWIW, about once a month I have students approach me to do “volunteer” work in the lab because they want to gain experience. I work very hard to instead bring them on as at least temporary-part time (if they have student benefits) or greater (if they don’t). So I guess I’m self-contradictory here.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
The anti -union arguments here aren’t addressing the issue – Why can’t people vote to be represented by a union. If you have good reasons against a union, make them to the graduate assistants and then let them vote. Preventing a vote because your arguments aren’t persuasive is just misuse of authority – and exactly why unions are desired.
Jeff Boatright
@Barry: Could I have some wooden nickels, then? ‘Cause while it’s true that students don’t pay that tuition, it sure comes from individual PI grants, departmental/divisional funds or somewhere. It’s not just numbers on a spreadsheet.
Jeff Boatright
@Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937: I wasn’t aware that anyone was making anti-union arguments. I’m sure not. If students want to unionize, as several have pointed out here, they can and it won’t be the end of the world. It seems to me that what I’ve read in the thread is that people are saying that there are up and down sides to unionizing graduate students.
…and then there are other people saying that people who bring up the down sides are poopy heads and should have their email boxes filled with multiple FUs. Well, it’s a big ol’ intertooby thing with lots of people in it.
Jeff Boatright
@jonas: Yep, you make good points. Thanks for helping me think more about this.
Jeff Boatright
@daveNYC: Hi Dave, possibly I can explain by boring you with my history. I started as a lab technician for a couple of years while my wife was in law school. Very clearly what I did then I considered ‘work’ for my employer (though I enjoyed the heck out of it). When I entered graduate school, my attitude, and the attitudes of every prof I came into contact with, was that any ‘work’ I was doing was for me. Sure there was a symbiotic relationship with my eventual mentor in that experiments I designed and conducted had to fit within a very broad scope defined by the grants that funded the research, but those were my experiments and data, I wrote them up, I got professional credit for them. And so did my mentor, or “employer” (who is still a good friend and we’re now collaborating again after years of having separate interests).
And that’s about all I did in grad school. I took the classes that I had to take, I came up with a hypothesis that could be tested within the bounds of the funding available, and I got on with it. There was never really an opportunity for someone to abuse my potential labor since my labor was always to the furtherance of my personal goals. Apparently this is not case for many graduate students. I simply haven’t met those people yet. Possibly I’m surrounded by people living in quiet desperation without knowing it. I’m not the most sensitive guy, sooo…
And not to hit and run, but I’ve now finished lunch and need to get back at it. I’ll check in as time allows. Thanks.
Marc
@Barry:
I’ve already said that I oppose making forming a union illegal.
I’ve also already said that there are circumstances where forming a union could be reasonable. Finally, I’ve noted that there are some specific problems with a union model for science graduate students – ones that should be addressed in a proper model.
It is not clear to me that unions address the specific issues raised by actual students. It is clear to me that a lot of the people blowing smoke on this issue are people who have no experience in the academy, no idea about how science works, and no understanding of how graduate education actually works.
It may help to actually address these specific points, as opposed to grunting “union good…anyone who sees any potential problems evil”.
This is Republican level arguing.
Pseudo Irishman
@Linnaeus:
Hear, Hear! All labor does indeed have dignity. I also second what Linnnaeus says about the flexibility of a contract. I’m a grad student instructor at Michigan and our contract reflects the unique working environment of GSIs, while respecting the academic judgement of professors. For example, our hiring process permits departments to hire anyone they want and place people where they want. Where we put emphasis on GSI rights is transparency: making sure that all job opportunities get posted in a timely manner and making sure that departments lay out the reasoning process by which they hire people. Over the years, these safeguards combined with a grievance procedure have helped break up some of the “good-old boy” networks.
Some other issues we have worked on have included drastically expanding the availability and affordability of child-care for GSIs, giving access to grad school to hundreds of people (particularly women) who wouldn’t be able to afford it or have flexibility to attend otherwise. The program has been so successful that the university has extended to all students and brags about how great it is (without giving us any credit, of course)
During last years contract negotiations, we developed a very innovative, more flexible and quicker way of helping graduate student instructors with disabilities get proper work accommodations. The program will cost UM very little, but eliminate many of the institutional hurdles that insensitive supervisors, penny-pinching department chairs and out-of-touch deans might throw in the way of, say, a person with a degenerative spinal condition getting an orthopedicly appropriate chair for their office, or a vision-impaired GSI getting proper screen-reading software.
These three issues are examples of employment issues that a union could help improve — all without interfering with legitimate academic judgment.
TB
I might add to the discussion that of all the science and engineering faculty I know, not one believes the students do not have a right to vote for themselves on this issue. They certainly have that right, and it is in everyone’s best interests to inform themselves of both the upsides and the potential downsides and vote accordingly.
I hope that one of the things that students will learn out of this whole debate is that, in their PhD research, they are working for themselves, not the professor. In my experience the ones who eventually realize that at some level do very well. The ones who go all the way through grad school thinking they work “for Professor X” are not the top students, and usually do no meaningful research of their own after their PhD. One way to tell when a student is ready for the PhD is that they have evolved into true colleagues.
Pseudo Irishman
Also,
I’d like to push back on the idea of a “9 to 5” mentality. GSRAs want to work hard and they recognize that that might take lots of late nights and long days in the lab. A union contract can easily take that into account. Probably an RA contract wouldn’t have hard caps on hours, which would be counterproductive. What it might have instead are safeguards to allow GSRAs to take time off with appropriate notice. It also might force the university say, to pay for cab fare home if a GSRA is working after 11 p.m. (a saftey issue) Or it might guarantee them at least a certain number of days off per week averaged over a one-month period to allow for the vagaries of experiments.
The point is that GSRAs would run a GSRA union and negotiate contract language that would work for GSRAs. I know this because that’s how the current union for Grad Student Instructors works — I sat on the bargaining team last year. Every member of every bargaining team for the last 15 years has been a volunteer member. Local and state-level staff offer expertise and assistance as necessary, but members call the shots in developing a platform, writing the language, negotiating the details of contract and finally ratifying the whole thing.
It can be a bit complicated at times, but it works — by incorporating lots of members at every step in the process, we get a contract that is very responsive to the needs of our members, and also a broad base of members who are willing to buy into enforcing it.
Jeff Boatright
@TB:
I think I’ve found my “problem” in terms of my babblings in this thread. TB’s statement has always been so obvious to me that I’ve never considered the world any other way. How you could possibly be getting an advanced degree and be thinking that you’re working for anyone but yourself is really a foreign concept to me.
Well, it is a big world with lots of different experiences.
Linnaeus
@Pseudo Irishman:
This is a key point to make, and I’d like to second this by saying that our union (which represents both RAs and TAs) works like this too. Our union is constantly organizing (you have to in a union like ours), making contacts all over the university, and soliciting feedback from all kinds of ASEs. Our bargaining teams are broadly representative of the various academic fields and are pretty conscientious about making sure that the priorities of ASEs in different fields are addressed as much as possible.
One thing you find is that there are common interests across fields. Last time around, for example, both TAs and RAs were very concerned about the status of their health insurance benefits (they’re covered by the same plan), which the university initially proposed to cut, and our union’s bargaining team was able to negotiate the university away from that position.
Linnaeus
@Jeff Boatright:
Because of the institutional context in which one is working. I agree that if you’re working on an advanced degree, you are working for yourself, but you are also part of a larger endeavor. Your work helps sustain the ongoing research efforts of the faculty member with whom you work as well as the research mission of the institution.
Jeff Boatright
@Linnaeus: So you’re saying that we’re working for ourselves in a collaborative effort that lets us all succeed. The concern might be if some of the participants don’t derive benefit equal to their input and that this inequality is based on an institutionalized classification. Is this about right?
Mnemosyne
@Joe Max:
The UAW was the union that was willing to help the TAs and RAs figure out how to organize in a way that would work for both the student workers and the UC, so that’s the reason why.
I hate for people to make it sound like somehow the UAW showed up on campus and forced the poor, innocent students into forming a union they didn’t want (the legendary “outside agitators”). The UAW was there at the specific request of the students to assist in their existing organizing efforts.
Linnaeus
@Jeff Boatright:
I’d say that’s pretty close, if I’m understanding your question correctly. Again, it’s very true that a GSRA (indeed, any student) is “producing” his or her own education. But they’re also doing labor – for pay- upon which their institution depends and they’re subject to institutional structures, classifications, etc. that delinate the conditions in which they work.
kerFuFFler
It’s very strange that in a country where the leaders continually bemoan the “low” number of students seeking advanced degrees in the hard sciences that the supposed remedy for this is to change science instruction at the elementary grade level and implement even more testing rather than increasing science funding to make sure that there are enough decent paying jobs to lure bright, hardworking young adults into these fields. Professors, after lengthy doctoral programs and post docs (with the attendant opportunity costs) make a fraction of what their peers in other fields make. And many of them cannot even find jobs!
“The median expected salary for a typical Asst. Professor – Chemistry in the United States is $54,226.” It’s not horrible, but considering that the people getting these degrees are some of the most talented and hardworking young people in our society, it sure seems like the market is not operating very efficiently when slacker MBA’s with no intellectual curiosity regularly get paid about twice as much after a mere two year program.
The underfunding of science trickles down to the graduate student experience. My son is finishing up a chemistry PHD at a top tier university and works 65 to 70 hour weeks religiously. (His academic adviser is a bit of a dick and requires six day weeks year round—-if they take a two day weekend he hounds them until they “make it up” by working all seven days, which means that they actually then have a thirteen day stretch of working the long hours.) He gets around 30K a year which is just less than $9 an hour for a job that is stressful, dangerous, and highly skilled. Sure, his “tuition” is free, but he has only had to take a handful of classes and shall have spent five years basically teaching and doing lab work for almost all of it. And frankly, all first jobs are essentially training.
Somehow, for a student who placed in the top one percent of college graduates (for what GRE scores are worth…) getting a five year “job” paying under $9 an hour hardly seems a likely or appropriate outcome in our much vaunted meritocratic system. Yeah, I know, as a mom nothing could possibly be good enough for my baby, but I do think the system takes advantage of young scientists much the way college football takes advantage of their athletes. Except that the university itself is not profiting; we are as a society underpaying our scientists. We get away with this because some people are truly “infected” with a love of learning.
Barry
@Jeff Boatright: My point about wooden nickels is that it’s actually money taken by the university administration, by making up figures. Count the Ph.D.’s in your department, and find out how many are paying full load (through loans, of course).
Barry
@Marc: “I’ve already said that I oppose making forming a union illegal.”
Then why are you posting here?
Barry
@Marc: “It may help to actually address these specific points, as opposed to grunting “union good…anyone who sees any potential problems evil”.”
We spent a lot of time over on Crooked Timber doing that.
I’d appreciate it if you stopped ‘Republican arguing’.
Barry
@kerFuFFler: “It’s very strange that in a country where the leaders continually bemoan the “low” number of students seeking advanced degrees in the hard sciences ”
The USA is not short of STEM/hard science/whatever degree earners and holders. One only need look at the starting salaries, and the employment prospects for 40+ aged workers to know that there is no shortage.
““The median expected salary for a typical Asst. Professor – Chemistry in the United States is $54,226.” It’s not horrible, but considering that the people getting these degrees are some of the most talented and hardworking young people in our society, it sure seems like the market is not operating very efficiently when slacker MBA’s with no intellectual curiosity regularly get paid about twice as much after a mere two year program.”
In other words, they start at less than a BS engineer from a decent school would get.
Barry
BTW, if people want to review Marc’s arguments, and also whether or not they were dealt with:
http://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/06/the-jedi-master-fallacy-and-others/
Barry
@kerFuFFler: “Except that the university itself is not profiting; we are as a society underpaying our scientists. We get away with this because some people are truly “infected” with a love of learning.”
The universities are profiting from this. As I’ve pointed out, the market value of his graduate tuition is basically zero.
Marc
@Barry:
I’m not allowed to have opinions that disagree with your distorted view of what I think?
Marc
@Barry:
When I get a grant it gets charged real money for graduate student tuition. This means that the actual cost for supporting a graduate student from a grant is quite high – not at the same level as that for a postdoctoral researcher, but substantial. The students in the sciences don’t pay tuition, but that’s because we can offload enough of the costs to federal agencies.
Faculty salaries vary dramatically by field, and furthermore the link between them and graduate student unions is rather…indirect. Do you have a point?