Should grad students have the right to unionize?

 

But could the era of the starving student be nearing an end? 

 

With Obama’s recent appointment of two union lawyers to the National Labor Relations Board, much is being made of the possibility that this more worker-friendly panel will recognize students’ right to engage in collective bargaining at private universities. Naoki Fujita, a full-time worker and part-time law student in New York, posted the news on Facebook alongside a call to action: “Grad students roll out of your bedclothes and rejoice! (Or organize...)”

 

Some background: in 2004, a very different NLRB ruled that graduate students at Brown University had no right to unionize because they were students, not employees. So the long hours you put in lecturing, grading papers, and meeting with students? Or in the lab, trying to cure cancer in zebra fish? That’s all just part of your training, a sort of apprenticeship, and therefore not subject to compensation commensurate with time and effort. Many students feel that organizing could improve their lot, helping them to secure a living stipend and benefits such as tuition remission and better medical coverage.

 

“The real core of what student workers are after is the ability to be fully-functioning members of the academic community,” says Peter Rickman, President of the Teaching Assistants’ Association and dual-degree graduate student pursuing labor studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

 

Because UW-Madison is a public university, its labor rights are governed by the state rather than the NLRB, but Rickman feels that the recent appointments bode well for the future of grad students everywhere. “The Board now includes a majority of people who have stated unequivocally that grad student workers are indeed workers. This is exciting not only for student workers but for academia at large.”

 

The fact of the matter is, tenure-track jobs have been on the decline for the past couple decades as universities rely more on contingent workers, including grad students and adjunct professors, to teach classes and conduct research. (Rickman characterizes the trend more bluntly: “Universities are doing it on the cheap.”) So while grad students are producing more work for their institutions, and usually borrowing significant sums to do so, they can no longer expect high-quality academic jobs to be waiting for them on the other side. For this generation, it can seem like too small a return for so large an investment.

 

Though very few students would disagree that something’s gotta give, many are still reluctant to organize. Some are afraid of demanding better pay or benefits lest they be seen as rabble-rousers. “It can get very personal,” says Fujita. “What’s on [students’] minds is how they might alienate the faculty in their department or their deans, who have a real interest in keeping down labor costs.” 

 

Rickman admits that this is an issue. “Some faculty think that this is getting in the way of the relationships between students and advisors, mentors and mentees.” After all, these professors once had to go through the vagaries and indignities of being grad students themselves. Do they see the stress and poverty as a rite of passage? “I think it’s more of a class issue,” Rickman says. “There’s this bias that unions are not for white collar workers.”

 

However, there are indications that tenure-track professors are beginning to realize how they too can benefit from collective action. In 2009, the AFT-Wisconsin, which represents the TAA as well as every other AFT-affiliated union throughout the state, succeeded in gaining collective bargaining rights for faculty and academic staff. It had been a 30-year effort. “The next big front for public universities is going to be the building of wall-to-wall unions,” Rickman says, including all academic workers in the picture. So if working for a university were a better gig, studying at one would be more viable too.

 

Until then, the anecdotes abound. There’s the Ph D candidate on food stamps, the student of social work who has to take a second job on top of her full-time internship in the field, the medical research assistant who can’t afford to see a doctor. Despite the differences in fields of study and day-to-day duties, student workers are after the same thing: they want to focus on their education, not their survival. As Rickman puts it, “What unites us is bigger than what divides us.”