Why Unionize?
Across the country, academics are struggling to find ways of reversing a damaging trend towards a part-time university teaching staff. A faculty unionization vote restored tenure at the University of Minnesota. A judge's ruling reinvigorated the Uuniversity of California graduate teacher unions' struggle for a contract, leading to rolling strikes two years in a row. And here at Yale, over 200 graduate teachers went on "grade strike" in January, 1996, sparking a wave of administrative retaliations that prompted the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to make the precedent-setting determination that teaching assistants (TAs) at private universities are covered by labor law as "employees". Since that determination, fledgling unionization movements have sprung up across the country. What is happening in American universities that has the academic workforce joining the labor movement? Why unionization?
Our generation of graduate students was told, "Don't worry, in the 1990's there'll be a wave of faculty retirements and jobs will reappear." Unfortunately they haven't, and too many of us have heard, or lived, tales of adjunct-hell. Universities have come to believe that refilling tenured positions is not cost-effective. After all, they can get more teaching, more cheaply, out of a fleet of part-timers than a few full professors. Currently, almost half of all faculty positions are part-time (up from 22% in 1970). U.C. San Diego recruits freshly minted Ph.D.s into a new faculty temp pool. The possibility of a tenure-track job is by far the exception, and never the rule. For years, we have all been wringing our hands over the state of the job market &endash; but who will do something?
As administrations increasingly adopt the corporate model for making decisions&endash; and as faculty increasingly wash their hands of anything not affecting their own departmental fiefdoms&endash; graduate students find themselves with few allies as they face the trend toward an academy staffed by casuals and temps (otherwise known as adjuncts and TAs). Perhaps surprisingly, we also find ourselves with the means of reversing that trend. We unionize.
I've toyed with getting business cards printed&endash; on the left, "Religious studies graduate student"; on the right, "union organizer". Friends chuckle at the idea. Unions are something of an enigma for the intellectual left: time and again I have heard general pro-union sentiments immediately followed by virulent opposition to the particular unions on campus. So long as college teachers were firmly ensconced in tenured (or tenure-track) jobs, their abstract support of "workers" could disappear as soon as things got messy. As tenure withers away, however, and the possibility of a career as an academic part-timer looms large in every graduate student's future, a little bit of messiness doesn't seem so bad . . .
Yale is at the forefront of graduate unionizing efforts not because Yale is a complete anomaly (would that that were so!), but because Yale is among the most aggressive academic corporations. For example, Yale's response to the grade strike came straight out of the corporate book on union-busting: firing TAs, threatening to ruin careers with negative letters of recommendation, and making an example of three women strikers by "disciplining" them with threats of expulsion and deportation. In addition to earning Yale censure votes by the MLA, AHA, and AAUP, these extreme retributions got the NLRB involved, setting in motion the procedures that will make legal union recognition the norm for TAs at private universities across this country, as it already is in many others.
The analysis is rather straightforward: Because it is cheaper, universities shift to hiring more adjuncts and graduate teachers to perform the personalized teaching that used to rest squarely upon the shoulders of senior faculty. The mix is deadly: fewer new faculty positions and an excessive recruitment of graduate students. The solution, however, is likewise straightforward (at least in theory)&endash; a national campaign that both impacts the university economy and educates the public. We must make it more expensive for universities to rely heavily on part-time teachers. And we must highlight the pedagogical price of underpaying and overworking those who teach our college students, and of denying them job security and and viable future prospects. Unions expertly spearhead such campaigns.
Those struggling to rescue the Academy from corporate administrations have found an experienced ally in the labor movement. I can say with pride, and without contradiction, that I split my time between writing a dissertation on Spinoza and organizing a union at Yale (I think Baruch would understand). I look forward to seeing you at graduation, as I carry a Ph.D. in one hand, and a contract in the other!
Antony Dugdale
Graduate Student, Yale Department of Religious Studies
Organizer, Graduate Employees and Students Organization
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This page was last updated on: November 5, 1999 |
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Graduate Employees and Students Organization |
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