What is a union?
A union is an organization of the workers in a workplace (often called a “shop”) who represent their interests during contract negotiation and work to make sure labor law is enforced on the shop floor. Unions can wins demands shorter workdays, higher pay, workplace safety, or better health care during contract negotiation by working together. No one person has the negotiating power to get all of these demands in a contract, but, if all the workers in a shop come together, they can leverage management into meeting their demands. In the US, this right to collective bargaining is secured by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the full text of which can be found here.
Why can graduate students unionize? Aren’t they students?
Graduate students both work and learn, typically teaching courses or performing paid research as a part of their degree. Often the cost of tuition for graduate students is waived as long as they perform this labor, meaning that their status as “student” is inextricably linked to their status as “worker.”
According to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB, the part of the government that enforces the NLRA) public universities, such as UMass, are barred from Federal bargaining rights under the Taft-Hartley Act, as they are state employees. Instead, their ability to unionize is governed by state labor law.
The ability of private university graduate student workers to organize has been hotly contested, with the NLRB first ruling in favor of graduate student unions in 1970, in a case brought by Cornell. However, this ruling has been overturned several times. Currently, under a 2016 ruling brought by New York University (NYU) graduate employee unions are legal in private universities.
In addition to having a tenuous legal status, graduate workers face a lot of unusual organizing circumstances. Graduate workers must win public support for their campaigns from both tenured faculty and undergraduate students, in addition to pressuring the administration. Not only do graduate workers themselves have to understand themselves as workers in order to create support for the union, but they must also persuade potential on campus allies and the public of this fact. Additionally, graduate workers perform a wide variety of labor and it can be difficult to create solidarity across, jobs, programs, and departments.
Why do they need a union anyways?
Graduate Employee organizing first began in the US a part of the New Left of the 1960’s, as young people stood up for racial and gender equality, and against the military industrial complex. A lot of this organizing was done on college campuses, by both graduate and undergraduate students. In addition to fighting for traditional economic demands, these early activists began to push for demands around the creation of women’s and ethnic studies departments, the hiring of more women and people of color, and equal treatment of these workers once hired.
Although we think of intellectual labor as cushy or easy, the university profits off of student labor just as any other employer does. If an autoworker makes a car in 20 hours, is paid $10/hour, and the plant sells the car for $1,000, then the plant has extracted $800 of labor from the autoworker. Karl Marx calls this the “surplus value of labor.” Similarly, a graduate student may receive $5,000 to teach a class of 50 students. If each student pays $500 in tuition for that class, then the university has extracted $20,000 of surplus labor value.
These labor of issues became more prominent on college campuses beginning in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s as a process known as neoliberalization threatened universities. Facing increasing state budget cuts and rising tuitions, universities began to look for more ways to cut costs, such as larger class sizes and slashing healthcare costs, raising the amount of surplus value of labor extracted from graduate workers. This saw a wave of graduate student organizing, including GEO at UMass
Who organized the first graduate unions?
The Graduate student organizing movement came out the tumult and rebellion of the 1960’s. Student groups like Students for a Democractic Society (SDS) made campuses a place of organizing particularly in support of Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War. This wave of student action lead to demonstrations, including everything from burning draft cards to picketing weapons manufactures. The height of SDS related student activity came in April 1968, when students shut down Columbia University by going on the largest student strike in American history. Thus early graduate organizing in the US had its roots in social movement organizing.
Are graduate unions considered craft or industrial unions?
Graduate union organizing began after the merger of the AFL and the CIO, so this is an intellectual rather than institutional distinction. In America, the graduate student unions can be considered a craft union. Most campuses already had active bargaining units by the 1990’s, typically dining workers, maintenance, and cleaning workers are unionized. Graduate unions did not emerge from student workers sharing grievances with these existing units, but from established unions looking for a large population that could easily be radicalized to help falling membership numbers. While graduate students do represent a number of jobs, their numbers are typically strongest within TAs, and often address teaching specific grievances. Additionally, many graduate unions place a heavy emphasis on the academic nature of their labor, and draw distinctions from blue collar workers, even those in existing bargaining units on campus.
In America the exception to this is United Campus Workers, a project of the Communication Workers of America (CWA). This a project at a number of public universities in the South that is a true, wall-to-wall industrial union. The South has always been more hostile to organized labor, due to being more impoverished, less urbanized, and the legacy of enslavement. Public universities in the South are both less prestigious and less white than those with unionized graduate students in the North or California. Additionally, the unionization of public universities is dependent on state law, which is substantially more hostile in the South. UE (United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers) 150 emerged to challenge a law prohibiting public sector unions in North Carolina. Thus, the United Campus Workers represents an exciting paradigm shift in graduate organizing, and a remains a project to watch.
What is the status of graduate unions today?
The NLRB decides whether a workplace is eligible to unionize and who is eligible for the bargaining unit. Currently, under the 2016 Columbia ruling, graduate students at both public and private universities are union eligible. To see the whole history of legal rulings, visit the timeline.