It's been a week of non-stop news for the graduate employee union movement in what has been an eventful year. At least in the realm of higher education, the labor movement is kicking, though not always with the best of results.
First, the bad news: Graduate employees at the University of Minnesota rejected union representation by the United Electrical Workers (UE) by a vote of 1296-1779.
Meanwhile, back on the East Coast: As reported in the NYT, graduate employees at Yale and Columbia Universities have entered the third day of their weeklong strike for union recognition, concluding this afternoon with a large rally in New York featuring AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.
What does this all mean? Take a gander below the fold...
While the tactfulness of conducting an autopsy while the body is still warm may be questionable, it's pretty instructive to see what was written about the election at the University of Minnesota. According to
insidehighered.com:
Truth About Unionization, a group of graduate students who campaigned against GradTRAC, raised questions about union dues and about the political agenda of the national union with which graduate students would have affiliated. Truth About Unionization called the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers "a partisan and overtly political organization that does not reflect and cannot support or represent the many beliefs and stances of the student body that is the University of Minnesota graduate students."
Many of the leaders of the anti-union group are scientists -- a group that has been skeptical of union drives on a number of campuses.
The latter part of the quote, the skepticism of graduate employees in the natural sciences, is a fairly common phenomenon in all but a few graduate employee unions. While many public universities are pretty hard-up for cash due to the decline in public funding, natural science departments tend to sit pretty due to being awash in grant money and corporate partnerships - moreso than, say, your average philosophy or sociology department (not that I'm bitter). Grad employees in the hard sciences are better compensated - these departments not only have the funds to attract and retain the best and brightest students, but they are also competing with private industry for the available pool of scientists. This is not to say that there is no reason for scientists (or engineering students, or business students, etc. etc.)to not want to unionize. But we'll look at that in a second.
The "information" put out by the group Truth About Unionization is an obvious red herring, ripped straight from the union-busting manual. While it is no secret that the UE is one of the more progressive unions, it's a canard to accuse it of being unable to represent the breadth of political opinions within the graduate employee body. Two points: 1) Unions may not use membership dues for partisan political campaigns, such as donations to candidates. Instead, they must establish political funds and PACs to which members may voluntarily contribute. 2) Since unions are the only voluntary organizations required by law to be democratic, members have ample opportunities to participate in how the union approaches its political activities.
Without knowing all the facts on the ground, my educated guess about the reasons for the failure of this campaign revolve around 1) an anti-union campaign by the employer (a given in these situations) and 2) difficulties in organizing. Organizing grad employees is notoriously difficult, somewhat akin to herding cats. Tracking down office and lab locations, trying to figure out the funky schedule most academic employees keep, these are all common difficulties to organizng contingent academic workers (I'm tossing part-time adjuncts into this group). Moreover, this difficulty is compounded by having a 4000+ member bargaining unit, as was the case in Minnesota. And for the proverbial cherry on top, universities in urban locations, such as the Twin Cities, make this type of organizing an undertaking of Himalayan proportions.
I'm curious to know how much the Minnesota campaign focused on bread-and-butter issues, which appeal to humanities and social science employees, but don't have the same punch with scientists. Any Golden Gophers care to comment? That said, I hope the University of Minnesota Administration does take notice that a large percentage of their graduate employees were pissed off enough about their working conditions that they sought union representation.
Now, on to the Ivy League...
Graduate employees at Yale and Columbia Universities have been trying to organize with UNITE-HERE and UAW, respectively, for years now. Unlike those of us at public institutions (such as those at the University of California, Michigan, Oregon, Wisconsin, and UMass, among others) who are regulated by state employee relations boards, graduate employees at private universites are goverened by the National Labor Relations Board. In 2000, the NLRB recognized graduate assistants as employees in their NYU decision. The NLRB, however, ignored this precedent and last summer reversed this decision in their Brown decision, maintaining that graduate assistants at private universities are primarily students. This effectively stalled union recognition drives not only at Yale and Columbia, but also at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania. To this day, NYU has the only recognized graduate employee bargaining unit at a private university, and this may change as their contract comes up for re-negotiation in the coming months.
On its face, the Brown decision is absurd. Graduate employees are obviously workers. They teach classes, run lab and discussion sections, conduct research (that more often than not is not directly tied to their own research projects), all for a compensation package that barely allows them to cover their basic expenses for living and oftentimes does not include health care. There's an added irony: according to the Yeshiva decision, faculty members at private universities are considered supervisors and are thus not eligible for union representation. Who are they supervising? Graduate employees? Taken together, the Brown and Yeshiva decisions demonstrate the peculiar logic of the increasingly anti-labor NLRB.
Perhaps more insidious, however, is the growing reliance of universities on the labor of graduate employees in particular, and contingent academic workers in general. These workers are obviously cheaper than tenured faculty, and their employment status is "flexible" (to use the current euphemism for "expendable") to meet enrollment demands. Taken within the broader assault on the tenure system, especially by wingnuts like David Horowitz, and within the growing corporatization of the academy as a simple degree mill, the hostility of university administrators to the unionization attempts of graduate employees and adjuncts is, while despicable, unfortunately understandable.
Anyways, for those of you in the greater New York region, get out there and walk the lines with the graduate employees! These folks are integral to providing a quality education in our universities. And to my striking brothers and sisters in New York and New Haven: stand strong! Know the labor movement stand behind you!
Also: keep your eyes open for coverage of a major rally held this afternoon in New York supporting collective bargaining rights for academic workers.