Dispelling misconceptions about grad student unions

It’s an exciting time for graduate student labor. Recently, the National Labor Relations Board decided to grant the right to unionize to students who work as teaching and research assistants at private universities. Since then, graduate students at a number of institutions have begun organizing support around unionization and even petitioning the NLRB for union recognition. Graduate students at the University may be next.

However, there are signs that graduate students here may face unsympathetic responses from the University community. The Editorial Board has done their part, penning a strikingly uninformed piece against unionization earlier this month. This editorial deserves a response because it articulates several misconceptions about organized graduate student labor that seem unfortunately common among the larger campus community.

The Editorial Board’s unconvincing claim that any opinion on this issue must be “speculative” because of “the scarcity of graduate student unions at peer institutions” serves as a convenient excuse to forego any substantive research that might back up their reactionary assumptions. Among them: that unionization would present significant and overall harmful administrative and financial hurdles, that a labor union would only benefit graduate students for a few years and unfairly saddle future students with bargaining arrangements they did not decide upon, that a union would damage relationships between students and other members of the university community, and that graduate students’ academic roles should preclude them labor protections.

First of all, the Editorial Board exhibits a glaring neglect for existing evidence on graduate student organizing. While it is true that, due to the NLRB’s 2004 decision against organizers at Brown University, graduate student unions have not previously existed at private universities aside from New York University, unions have a long history at public universities. When it comes to many aspects of academic labor, such as student-faculty relationships or short-term contracting of teaching and research positions, the commonalities between public and private institutions are strong enough to dispel the Editorial Board’s “speculative” concerns about damaged University relationships or prohibitive administrative and financial challenges.

Administrative and financial hurdles should be far easier for the University to handle (with its ever-growing $22.2 billion endowment) than it would be for schools, like the University of Michigan, that are frequently forced to deal with budget cuts and political pressure. Furthermore, there is no substantial evidence to suggest that unionization has harmed relationships between public university graduate students and their larger campus communities. Most aspects of student-faculty relationships, such as personal and professional support or academic freedom, should not be impacted differently by unionization at the University than by organizing at advanced research institutions like the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, and the University of California system.

Despite some critics’ concerns that student organizing would negatively impact relationships with faculty, evidence suggests the opposite; the American Association of University Professors has come out in support of unionization, arguing that “the most current research on the issue finds that graduate student unionization poses no adverse effect on faculty-student relations.” The AAUP also notes that collective bargaining promotes academic freedom by allowing students, faculty, and administrators to “discuss collectively how best to do their shared work of teaching and research” and by providing contractual guarantees that protect individual academic freedom. A 2013 study of public university unions supports these claims, demonstrating that unionization does not harm faculty-student relationships or academic freedom, and instead offers benefits in the form of higher pay and higher reported levels of personal and professional support.

The Editorial Board’s piece also reflects a poor understanding of the way that academic labor functions in the current University model, particularly in its argument that unionization would saddle future students with a bargaining arrangement that they did not decide upon. The problem with this line of thinking is that it treats research and teaching assistant work as a temporary stop-over between being either a full-time student or a full-time working professional. How can current graduate students, the Board wonders, justifiably put in place a long-standing legal and administrative arrangement with the University when these students will likely graduate in a few years?

The reality of academic labor today is that short-term contracted teaching and research jobs have become careers in themselves as the number of tenure-track positions has steadily declined. Maggie Doherty has been employed by Harvard University for ten years teaching writing to freshmen and teaching tutorials on American history, and she observes that graduate students end up spending seven, eight or nine years “doing faculty-level work for a fraction of faculty pay, under the pretense that they are being ‘trained’ for jobs that don’t exist.” If graduate students should be discouraged from organizing because of their temporary status at particular institutions, as the Editorial Board seems to think, then unionization is frowned upon for the very same reason that graduate students have little leverage to bargain with universities and “feel pressured to stay silent in order to protect their health care.”

Unions have already shown concrete benefits for students at institutions similar to the University. Largely thanks to collective bargaining, NYU increased graduate student stipends from $12,500 to $22,000 a year and eliminated health care premiums. At Harvard, the mere threat of unionization seems to have recently sparked an intentionally-timed enhancement to funding packages. While the University may offer a higher stipend than many other institutions, unionization is not solely a question of money — to quote Columbia student Paul R. Katz, “it’s a question of power and democracy in a space in the academy that’s increasingly corporatized, hierarchical.” Former Cornell student Robb Willer, who was involved in unionizing efforts, emphasizes “the ideals of collective bargaining, like the right to have a say in one’s workplace” rather than focusing solely on stipend levels.

Finally, as an undergraduate, I feel compelled to respond to the Editorial Board’s argument that unionization could harm the undergraduate experience. For one thing, their concern that unions would make it difficult for preceptors to meet with students is unfounded; Brown University, for example, states that “it is unlikely that the educational policy regarding allocation of student time would be subject to collective bargaining.”

More broadly, however, the Editorial Board’s attitude reflects a sense of entitlement to the work provided by graduate students. While graduate students, like undergraduates, partake in an educational environment, this participation does not invalidate their status as employees. If the undergraduate experience as it exists now requires that these employees are barred from having a fair say in their workplaces and relegated to a position of little real leverage, then it is time for us to rethink the way that we as undergraduates interact with the larger campus community.

Max Grear ’18 is a Spanish and Portuguese major from Wakefield, R.I. He can be reached at mgrear@princeton.edu.