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Comment on this article States of a Union
In 1991, a group of graduate teaching assistants formed the Graduate Employees and Students Organization. But after a decade of activism, GESO has yet to achieve university, or federal, recognition as a union. What’s up? October 2001
by Bruce Fellman A few years after labor organizer and songwriter Joe Hill was executed by a firing squad in Utah in 1915, poet Alfred Hayes wrote a tribute that included these lines:
From San Diego up to Maine,
In every mine and mill,
Where working men defend their rights,
It’s there you’ll find Joe Hill.
That poem eventually became one of the best known anthems in the union songbook, and while the organized labor movement has been flagging in recent years, Joe Hill’s spirit is certainly alive and well at Yale. The University’s established unions are beginning negotiations this fall on a new contract, and at a University where the labor environment has often been tense, President Levin has proposed to make Yale “a place for model labor relations.” But if the President is intent on extending an olive branch to the University’s organized workforce, he remains firmly—some would say uncharacteristically—opposed to the decade-long effort of a group of equally determined graduate students to create a union of their own. Unionization is simply “not in the best interests of graduate students themselves, undergraduates, or faculty,” says Levin. The hallmarks of the Graduate School are “collegiality, an individualized educational experience, and flexibility,” says the President. “Unions tend to impose uniformity, and while that may be desirable in an industrial setting, the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t translate effectively to our model of graduate education.” However, a significant number of graduate students (most of the union supporters are in the humanities and social sciences) claim that a union would offer them the best chance to achieve better working conditions while they pursue their doctorates and a way to guarantee good jobs afterwards. In their view, it may also be the salvation of a scholastic enterprise allegedly threatened by hostile influences.
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“All around the country, academics are leading lives of quiet desperation.”
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“All around the country, academics are leading lives of quiet desperation,” says J.T. Way, a fourth-year graduate student in Latin American history who chairs the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), the would-be union that was formally chartered in 1991 in response to a bad academic job market and concomitant feelings of exploitation. “Universities are increasingly following a corporate model, and they’ve learned that they can function by using armies of low-paid, unprotected workers. If we had a meaningful voice in the way the academy is run, we believe we could reverse this trend and create more full-time, protected teaching and research positions.” Wrong, says Levin, a Yale graduate student ('74PhD) in economics who was dean of the Graduate School before being named Yale’s 22nd president in 1993. While the President acknowledges that getting jobs in academia can be difficult, he categorically rejects both GESO’s analysis of the academic situation and its proposed cure. Graduate student unionization at Yale, Levin believes, threatens the foundation of the very institution the movement purports to want to save. So it has gone for a decade: a roller coaster of point-counterpoint, “look here” and “yes, but” debates about the University and its approach to graduate education. Regardless of which side one was on, however, it appeared that the administration would prevail. In the end, no matter who occupied the philosophical and moral high ground, Yale’s stance was buttressed by federal labor laws that had consistently emphasized the “student” status of graduate students at private schools. But last year the earth shifted. On October 31, 2000, in a case involving a unionization attempt at New York University, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) adopted the unprecedented view that graduate students there could be considered workers—and hence, eligible to form a union. The decision reinvigorated a movement at Yale that had stalled. (GESO does not make public a membership figure, but in the forms it is required to file with the U.S. Department of Labor, it claimed to have 750 members last year—slightly more than one-third of Graduate School students; it claimed 800 members the previous year.) The NYU opinion turned on the issue of student teaching as work, which lies at the heart of the unionization debate. In addition to mastering coursework, taking exams, and conducting independent research that is then written up as a thesis, almost all graduate students teach. Usually they serve as teaching assistants (TAs) who instruct and grade undergraduates in the discussion sessions of large lecture courses, and TA efforts are monitored by a senior professor. Union advocates argue that TAs are in fact employees of a university—and grossly underpaid, even exploited ones at that. But critics counter that developing the life of the mind isn’t quite analogous to surviving life in the mines. For his part, Levin sees graduate students in a more traditional light: as apprentices for whom a teaching assistantship is a critical part of a graduate education rather than a condition of employment. At many state universities, teaching is a quid pro quo for financial aid and is required every semester. In such situations, it is easy to envision the work as a job, and at public schools, state laws have long recognized TAs as eligible to form unions. The first teaching assistant union was chartered at the University of Wisconsin in 1969, and since then, 27 more public universities and university systems have joined the TA-union list. But private schools are governed by the provisions of the National Labor Relations Act, and until recently these laws have been interpreted as siding with Levin’s viewpoint and thus precluding the possibility of unionization.Workers have the right to organize; students do not. Not long ago, anyone wanting to pursue a PhD had to pay for the privilege, and while many schools offer a “teach for your stipend” program that clearly makes students seem like workers, other universities have adopted a kind of superstar option: They pay the way of certain standout students, who do some teaching, while they provide smaller packages (or none at all) to a second-tier group, who are expected to earn their keep in the classroom. In 1998, the University began offering all of its graduate students in doctoral programs a merit-based stipend. “If you’re good enough to get into Yale, you get a substantial financial aid package,” says Graduate School dean Susan Hockfield. The stipend for 2001-02 is at least $13,700 (the amount in the sciences approaches $21,000, but it covers a calendar year, rather than the nine-month, academic year of the humanities and social sciences), and it is awarded annually for five years. In addition, students receive a fellowship that covers the $23,650 tuition, and Yale offers grants for summer study, free health care for the individual student (a University subsidy makes family coverage available at half price), and a no-cost membership at the Payne Whitney gym, among other perks. “We estimate that this package is worth about $160,000 per student,” says Susan Hockfield, dean of the Graduate School. “It’s very competitive with Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, our major rivals for prospective students.” It is also very different from what is offered by many other universities. Graduate students here in the humanities and social sciences are only expected to assist in teaching one course in each of four semesters (typically, during the third and fourth years) of the ten covered by their fellowships. Even less teaching is expected in most of the science and engineering programs. And since teaching performance is not tied to the grant, it seems pretty clear to the administration which side of the employment divide students occupy. “Any comparison between a state school like Wisconsin and a private university such as Yale is a truly false one—a real apples-to-oranges comparison,” says Provost Alison Richard. The NLRB decision, however, altered the comparison in a fundamental way. Levin, who has emerged as a national spokesman on this issue, condemned the Board’s ruling and urged NYU “to carry the case to the federal courts if it has the opportunity.” But the school has instead opted to attempt to negotiate a contract with the Graduate Students Organizing Committee, which is also Local 2110 of the powerful United Auto Workers. The UAW represents some 13,000 TAs at the Universities of California, Washington, and Massachusetts, and with the NLRB stamp of approval on unionization efforts at private universities, the labor giant has put its considerable muscle (and financial resources) into organizing drives at Columbia, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. But while it is hardly a stretch to understand the affinity graduate student activists might feel for the American Federation of Teachers, the labor organization that helped the nation’s first TA union win recognition and that has gone on to secure contracts at a half dozen other public universities, the UAW and graduate teaching assistants would seem to be strange partners. Stranger still is the marriage between GESO and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), which also represents Yale’s two recognized unions, Locals 34 and 35. HERE international president John W. Wilhelm '67 explains that the relationship makes more sense than is immediately apparent. “Throughout the history of the U.S. labor movement, unions have often strayed outside their core industries to aid workers in trouble,” says Wilhelm, who began his career as a Local 35 organizer in the early 1970s. “Unlike the UAW and the AFT, we don’t have a national organizing program for graduate teaching assistants, but we were already on campus, so we helped GESO as a matter of principle.” Unions across the country have also discovered that providing assistance is highly practical. Organized labor has been steadily losing its clout; the percentage of workers in unions fell from over 20 percent in the early 1980s to below 14 percent at the turn of the 20th century. “Declines in membership weaken us at the bargaining table,” says Wilhelm.
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Graduate students represent a largely untapped source of potential new union members.
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Willie Sutton once declared that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is"; unions are organizing graduate students at least in part because they represent a largely untapped source of potential new members. But while critics have argued that increasing membership rolls is the only reason that the nationals have become involved, Wilhelm has a different explanation for the movement’s growing appeal. “Organizing comes out of deeply felt circumstances,” he says. “In this case, it’s the job market and the industrialization of the academy—unionization is an appropriate response.” To be sure, the employment picture for would-be professors is not good. A recent study by the American Historical Association of humanities disciplines found an ominous trend away from the use of full-time tenure track faculty, who now often make up fewer than 50 percent of the departments examined. And while the situation is somewhat better in the social sciences and the sciences, the direction is the same: the “brass ring”—the reward for earning a doctorate, a process that at Yale typically takes six years (and at other places, because of non-stop teaching, can take far longer)—is within the grasp of fewer and fewer travelers on the tenure track. No wonder some junior scholars are feeling, as J.T. Way observed, desperate and view what the President sees as an apprenticeship—and a happy one at that—as a dead-end serfdom. To help ameliorate the situation, the collective power of unionization might seem a natural ally. “When Yale employees have unionized, they’ve achieved changes,” says Wilhelm. Nevertheless, skeptical administrators, professors, and no small number of graduate students have expressed doubt that GESO can change the academic world, and they worry that the proposed cure may be worse than the disease. High on the list of potential objections is, of course, the possibility of strikes. TA unions at public universities are governed by state law, and in most cases, unionized state employees forgo the most persuasive weapon in the labor arsenal: the right to strike. However, these agreements are not always honored, and over the past year, TA unions at the Universities of Washington and California have traded exam books for picket signs. At a private university, just as in any private company, federal laws prevail—and these most certainly allow a union to strike when negotiations fail to produce an acceptable contract. Yale is no stranger to work stoppages, some of which have been lengthy and contentious. Its unions have staged them seven times in the past 40 years, and in 1995 GESO instigated a grade strike to attempt to force the University to accept it as the sole bargaining agent for graduate students. At the end of that fall’s semester, more than 200 teaching assistants refused to turn in grades. The University threatened disciplinary action, GESO filed an “unfair labor practices” charge with the NLRB, and undergraduate evaluations were briefly held hostage as the matter was resolved. Grades were turned in by mid-January, two weeks late, but an appeal of a court case that went against GESO was only settled last March, when chief administrative law judge Robert Ginnasi approved an agreement between Yale and the NLRB which acknowledged no wrongdoing. There are times when a strike is the only way to get results, but in this case, it failed to achieve its ultimate objective. The University did not recognize GESO as a legitimate union, undergraduate support eroded, and in the corrosive atmosphere that prevailed after the grade strike, the relationship between some graduate students and their faculty mentors was tarnished. Anti-GESO observers sketch out many unpleasant scenarios as possible outcomes of unionization; one of the most feared is any compromise of this relationship. In this view, collective bargaining, the often-adversarial process through which organized labor and management attempt to reach agreement on contract provisions, is the wedge that will be driven between professor and student. “Collective bargaining is antithetical to my idea of what a graduate education is all about,” says Provost Alison Richard, a professor of anthropology and mentor to at least 30 graduate students. “The process runs counter to the notions of flexibility and individuality that are at the heart of graduate preparation here, and it assumes a distinction between work and academic matters that in practice is difficult or impossible to make.” But HERE president Wilhelm counters that the University needn’t fear collective bargaining. “It’s simply about give and take,” he says. “If GESO asks for anything, the union only wins when it’s clear that Yale’s position is unjust.” And it’s also possible that professor-grad student relationship won’t be harmed. Indeed, in a University of Wisconsin doctoral thesis published in 1999, Gordon Hewitt, now a researcher at Tufts, examined the effects that unions had on mentoring, advising, and instructional activities by surveying 300 professors at five schools—UMass-Amherst, Florida, Michigan, SUNY-Buffalo, and Oregon—each of which had TA unions in place for four years or more. “Over 90 percent of the professors reported no negative educational impact on those three key components of the relationship,” says Hewitt. Matthew Jacobson, a Yale professor of history and one of a relative handful of pro-GESO faculty, concurs. “I don’t buy the argument that unionization would contribute to problems in working with TAs—in fact, I think it would be a change for the better,” says Jacobson. “I’ve never understood the apocalyptic, end-of-the-world arguments, and I can’t imagine a more corrosive atmosphere than would occur when TAs feel used.” Certainly a few of them do feel this way—and they are not shy about responding to perceived threats. Last winter, when Paul Kennedy, the J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History, announced that he would not offer a popular undergraduate course if prospective TAs wouldn’t pledge to continue teaching, even if the union ordered a strike, GESO countered by filing an unfair labor practices charge with the NLRB. The Yale Daily News editorialized against GESO’s tactic, which reinforced the administration’s worst fears about TA-unionization. “Issues here are best resolved through debate, and the findings of unfair labor practices that are quite routine in an industrial setting take on a chilling effect on freedom of speech and expression,” says Provost Richard. “It leaves everyone looking over their shoulders and wondering.”
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GESO members report cases of subtle harassment.
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For their part, GESO members report cases of subtle harassment—instances in which it is suggested that unionization activities will have adverse effects on prospects for an academic career. “The job market is bad, and when everything rides on a professor’s wholehearted endorsement, you can see how much power the faculty holds,” says J.T. Way. “But the professoriate doesn’t have to be the administration’s attack dogs.” Ruth Yeazell, who earned her doctorate here in 1971 and now chairs the English department, doesn’t feel that she’s doing Woodbridge Hall’s bidding. Yeazell does, however, acknowledge that when she arrived on campus ten years ago, graduate students had reason to be unhappy. “There were grievances to be addressed, a history of mistakes that helped feed the discontent,” she says. But over the past decade, the Graduate School, under Dean Hockfield and her predecessors, Thomas Appelquist, Richard Levin, and Jerome Pollitt, has addressed a number of those concerns. Stipend levels have increased dramatically. The revival of a Graduate Student Assembly and the inclusion of students on the boards of both administrative and departmental committees have given them a voice in Graduate School policies. The creation in 1997 of the McDougal Center, which provides career counseling, teacher training, and a place to get together, addresses the professional and social needs of the constituency. And according to internal Yale surveys and external studies, Yale PhDs, even in the continually lackluster job market, are doing reasonably well, an accomplishment attributed to the quality of the students and programs, career guidance help, and the Graduate School’s decision, part of a national trend, to reduce the number of students it enrolls. GESO claims credit for effecting some of these changes, but Provost Richard has another explanation. “The transformation of the school is being driven by the marketplace,” says Richard. “In our knowledge-based economy, Yale College grads are looking at unbelievably lucrative starting points for their careers. The academy, by comparison, looks less attractive. So if we want to snare a subset of the brightest and the best for careers in research, scholarship, and teaching, we have to bid for them.” As a result, it would seem to be a great time to be at Yale. “We think things are working relatively well,” says Yeazell. “But it’s clear that some of our students don’t agree.” GESO is not about to go away and last April, in an attempt to finally gain federal recognition, the would-be union called on the administration to respect a concept called “card count neutrality.” Workers wanting to unionize have the right to a free and fair, secret ballot election that can be conducted without fear of repercussions, but there is also another route. Instead of an NLRB-supervised election, union organizers give cards to each qualified member of the proposed bargaining unit. Management pledges its neutrality—in other words, it agrees to remain passively on the sidelines—and when a majority of people return certified cards marked “yes,” the union is recognized by the employer without the need for a formal vote. During unionization drives, federal labor law is very clear about the environment that must prevail. Management can certainly have its say, but any attempt to exert influence cannot become intimidation. The card count neutrality proposition has administrators seething. From the President on down, they’ve condemned it as antidemocratic and denying the opportunity for open debate. This impression was heightened when GESO representatives pulled out of a scheduled “town meeting” last April in which the issues were to be discussed in public. The would-be union cited solidarity concerns—other HERE representatives weren’t going to be allowed to take part—but Peter Salovey, chairman of the psychology department who earned his doctorate at Yale in 1986, sees it as symptomatic. “It’s an example of the rigid and adversarial climate that’s being created by using the labor union model in an inappropriate area,” says Salovey. “We’ve become politicized and polarized, and the whole campus is losing out.” There is a palpable sense of potential loss among faculty. In an essay published in the New York Times last May, Anthony Kronman, dean of the Law School, argued not only that the NLRB was wrong in giving graduate students employee status, but also that unionization could destroy the “intellectual and collegial culture of this institution.” Kronman, who earned a Yale doctorate in 1972 and a law degree in 1975, explained that even though he was in graduate school during more radical times, “it never occurred to us to view the University as a factory or students as factory workers. I loved the free life of the mind, and the spirit of unionization—the spirit of the collective—seemed as foreign to me then as it does now. The aim of graduate school is for teachers to bring students up to a level of equality and enable them to emerge as fellow teachers with TAs of their own. What worries me most about graduate student unions is that they encourage students and teachers to think of their relationship in a fundamentally different way.” It would not be a change for the better, says Kronman. But it hasn’t happened at Yale. Not yet, and perhaps, note observers, not ever. While the NLRB decision in the NYU case has given the movement a boost, the ruling could eventually be overturned. Moreover, there is no certainty at Yale that GESO can capture a majority of cards—or votes, if it ever came down to an election. “Graduate student unionization is not inevitable,” says President Levin. In a way, however, the movement has already had an important benefit. “At its heart, this is all about a collision between national higher education policy and national labor policy, and higher education risks being the casualty,” says Provost Richard. “But responding to GESO has forced us to articulate a philosophy and practice of graduate training that is much deeper and richer than it was in the past. We’ve had to determine what we really care about.”  |
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