THE FACULTY

As Teaching Assistants Push to Unionize, Debate Grows Over What They Would Gain

By COURTNEY LEATHERMAN

Many graduate students see unions as a chance to fight back against the bosses in their academic sweatshops. Others think they're just trading one taskmaster for another.

Last spring, graduate students across the country -- from Yale University to the University of California, and at places like the Universities of Illinois and Minnesota -- took action to force their administrations to recognize their unions.

Even in Southern states with right-to-work laws, students at institutions such as the Universities of Georgia, Kentucky, and North Carolina have formed groups to talk about unionization.

For many graduate students, a union card is the ticket to making their lives better -- higher salaries, better health benefits, and more training for the classroom. Lots of graduate students sign on hoping that unions will bring them less-tangible things, like respect.

But critics argue that the unions run smooth-talking campaigns that overstate the benefits they can bring to students without mentioning the baggage -- for instance, the way bargaining turns scholarly colleagues into adversaries while contracts legislate relationships.

"It may look as if it's a good answer to the real sense of frustration many have," says Judith S. Craig, an associate dean at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But she argues that students on her campus have lost as much as they've gained from a union.

Organized teaching assistants say she couldn't be more wrong.

"Graduate students now are a major resource for universities across the country in providing education for undergraduates. That's a plain fact," says Scott Saul, a doctoral student in American studies at Yale and an organizer for the graduate-student union there.

"With the work that we perform comes an expectation that our work will be respected and that our livelihoods will be secure," he says. "Administrators have had a very difficult time finding a means to achieve that security outside of a collectively bargained contract."

Whatever security teaching assistants may have felt generations ago has been eroded by downsizing and streamlining in the academy. Those management approaches have changed the academic workplace to make it look a lot more like other workplaces, and to make teaching assistants look like many other workers. Times have changed since graduate students were truly apprentices in the academy, say today's graduate students, scoffing at what they regard as the nostalgia of administrators who make that argument.

Some students say they once suffered from similar delusions. "I needed to be persuaded that I was an employee of the university," says Alex Lubin, a doctoral student in American studies at Minnesota. "But it didn't take much.

"What I came to learn is that graduate employees are workers, even if we're not blue collar." He thought he had a pretty good deal in his first year at the university. With a fellowship and a job as a grader in an undergraduate course, he got a package worth about $11,000. Minnesota waives tuition for teaching assistants -- a perk won in a failed union drive some years ago. The next year, without the fellowship and working 20 hours a week as a teaching assistant, Mr. Lubin earned $9,500 for the year. He had to take out a loan.

Only 18 universities in the United States recognize unions that represent graduate students, labor organizers say. At 10 other institutions, graduate students are campaigning for recognition, and their counterparts on at least 15 other campuses have formed groups to talk about forming a union.

Even if they don't win unions, students say their working conditions often improve simply by their campaigning. At Yale, for example, students won a $300 bonus last spring. Administrators at other universities where unionization isn't even an idea have taken note of such concessions.

In many of these campaigns, graduate students have turned to their peers at the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin, which have the two oldest graduate-student unions in the country. Students on other campuses have looked to them for advice and to learn what they've won in the past through collective bargaining.

Mark Kaplan became involved in Michigan's union from almost his first day as a graduate student in 1973. That fall, without notice, the administration announced a tuition increase for graduate students. He says the students protested and the administration backed down on that issue, but would not meet to discuss other concerns.

The union at Michigan, the Graduate Employee Organization, was certified in 1974 and went on strike for a month in February 1975 to get its first contract. Among other things, the union wanted a nondiscrimination policy, an explanation of the disparate pay scales used for graduate students in different disciplines, and a policy that would make work expectations uniform for graduate students. The students won much of what they were after and made Mr. Kaplan a believer in unions for graduate students. He is now the head of the philosophy department at Wisconsin's Milwaukee campus.

"From my point of view, as someone who hires and appoints graduate students," he says, "there could be nothing better than a strong union."

Unions raise wages, he says. "The more money I can offer to a potential student to induce him or her to come, the better off I am." He explains: "I get a better student and a student more devoted to his students and studies," because the graduate student isn't forced to take a second job.

Mr. Kaplan also likes the union because it makes clear what the rules are: He knows exactly what he can expect of his teaching assistants, and they know what they can expect from him.

Graduate students who organize expect to be consulted before administrators make changes that will affect their lives. Even if it does nothing else, they say, the union guarantees that. And organized teaching assistants have also come to expect their unions to get them health-care benefits and better pay, as well as preparation for the classroom and grievance procedures. Even with a union, however, it may be years before those expectations are realized. Organizers at the University of Oregon say it took 17 years for teaching assistants there to win health insurance.

While graduate students at Michigan are not allowed to strike, they say they have continued to make gains through bargaining. Their contract now includes a grievance procedure and a sick-leave policy.

At Wisconsin's Madison campus, the Teaching Assistants' Association is negotiating a new contract this fall. The big issue on the table is full-tuition waivers. Wisconsin is one of two Big Ten campuses that do not provide tuition waivers to graduate students. While the union has negotiated the highest salaries in the Big Ten -- $13,540 for teaching assistants who teach about 20 hours a week over nine months -- Madison graduate students come in last in take-home pay after tuition costs are figured, earning $6,826 for nine months. The union has offered to take a one-time pay cut in exchange for a full, permanent tuition waiver.

Another issue under negotiation is offering graduate students preparation for the classroom. The union wants a guarantee that teaching assistants will receive such training before they ever lead a class.

The demand is a popular one across the country, and it makes sense as a union issue, says Jon Curtiss, a paid organizer at Madison and a doctoral student at Michigan. "A union greatly enhances people's commitment to teaching," he says. "It gives you a place to claim the value of your work and lets you say, What I do is important."

He adds: "If there's a union on campus, you'll find the union talking about and doing more concrete things to better undergraduate education than the administration."

Would-be union organizers may go to Michigan and Wisconsin for advice, but they go to Iowa for inspiration. The union there, the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students, won its first contract in July.

"We get tons of letters and phone calls and e-mails from people wanting to know, How do I get me one of them union things," says Jonathan Kissam, a graduate student at Iowa and co-president of the union. His remark is tongue in cheek, but his belief in the union is serious.

The Iowa union won better health benefits as well as institution of a grievance procedure and a provision for the timely posting of job opportunities for graduate students. It lost on the issue of tuition waivers.

Sheldon F. Oppenheim, a post-doctoral fellow in chemical engineering at Iowa, believes winning a union for graduate students was really a loss. Mr. Oppenheim earned his doctorate at Iowa in 1996, and led about 30 graduate students who opposed the union. He argued that organizers were making promises -- about things like obtaining child-care provisions -- that they knew they could not keep. The state sets mandatory topics for bargaining, and child care is not one of them, he points out.

The initial contract at Iowa brought an across-the-board raise of $278 for the first year, an increase of about 2 per cent. But Mr. Oppenheim says he and other students in the sciences had been getting raises in the 7-per-cent range before that. The union has made life worse for him and his colleagues in the sciences, he says. "We like the status quo, we're comfortable with it, and the union comes in and botches that up," he says.

He and other critics argue that graduate students should focus less on collective bargaining for temporary teaching assignments and more on earning their degrees and getting out more quickly to find real jobs.

"Being a graduate student is about getting done," says Mr. Oppenheim, "not about setting up a life style here."

Ms. Craig, the associate dean at Madison, agrees: "We are not paying these people for full-time jobs to be full-time employees. We're paying them some financial support to assist them while they do their graduate study." She adds: "We wish they had enough money to live comfortably, but we can't necessarily provide that through this means," she explains. "These are part-time jobs."

Ms. Craig rattles off the drawbacks of a union -- for students, not just administrators. She says a union creates a central structure that makes it almost impossible to recognize the individual needs of departments. And, she says, the bargaining is inconsistent, because teaching assistants and their organizers are transient and lack institutional memory.

Moreover, she says, collective bargaining creates a rigid structure, often putting negotiations over academic workplaces into the hands of lawyers, state officials, and union leaders who have no appreciation of academe.

Because of that, she and others say, graduate students in the negotiations sometimes lose out. For example, Ms. Craig says that when states negotiate salary increases, they don't take into account the going rate for stipends at competing institutions. They look at salaries paid to other union employees.

John Folkins, an associate provost at Iowa, complains that the union makes communication with teaching assistants more difficult, not less. He notes that during the negotiation over a contract, the concerns of a faculty member had to be routed through a labor lawyer in Minneapolis and a union staff member in Pittsburgh before the matter could be taken to the graduate students.

Peter E. Nathan, a psychology professor at Iowa and former provost, is opposed to unionization, but he is sympathetic to the needs of graduate students.

"Fundamentally, I don't believe universities are places where unions make sense -- in places where scholars come together and communicate and negotiate," says Mr. Nathan. "It goes against my idea of a university where humane and civil values are most important."

"But if I were a graduate student at some places, I think I'd be in favor of unions."

He thinks the interest in unionization is part of the "Zeitgeist."

But not a passing fad, cautions Mike Miller, a doctoral candidate and a paid organizer for the graduate-student union at the University of California at Los Angeles. A job in academe may no longer be a safe bet for graduate students, he says, but unionization is.

"If people get it in their heads that they want a union," he advises, "there's nothing to do but give in to the demand."