Organizing graduate employees
Region 9A Leads the Way
As graduate employees at New York University anxiously wait for
the NLRB to count the ballots cast at their historic union election
in April, there is an increasing focus on organizing academic workers
into the UAW.
The election comes hot on the heels of the much-anticipated April
decision of the New York regional director of the National Labor
Relations Board (NLRB). The ruling said that graduate teaching assistants
at NYU are employees and should be free to unionize.
The decision marks a first for federal labor law and should open
the floodgates to unionization of teaching assistants at private
universities around the country. The UAW already represents around
13,000 public sector graduate employees at the Amherst and Lowell
campuses of the University of Massachusetts and the University of
California system.
Now, more than ever, is the time to organize academic workers,
including graduate assistants, into the UAW. Higher education has
undergone a fundamental transformation, and workers on campus are
facing the same problems as workers everywhere.
University administrators have mirrored corporate structures and
have increasingly incorporated profit-seeking missions. They have
centralized control and have eroded faculty governance. As a result
of this new stratification of higher education, there has been a
rapid increase in part-time teachers with no tenure protection,
no benefits, no job security, no health care, and no protections
for academic freedom. Much of the burden of this transformation
has fallen on graduate student employees who are exploited by universities
as a source of cheap labor.
Classroom duties for graduate students have, for the most part,
increased substantially. The job of a TA (teaching assistant) has
been transformed from helping professors grade papers and leading
discussion sections to essentially that of a part-time faculty member
who sometimes even teaches large lecture courses. At many major
universities, graduate students now handle more than half of undergraduate
instruction.
Our region contains the highest concentration of colleges and universities
of any area around the world. There are 58 institutions of higher
learning within a 10-mile radius of the center of Boston alone.
Region 9A can provide the workplace democracy that graduate workers
in higher education so desperately need.
In Region 9A we have pioneered the fight to organize graduate employees.
In the 10 years that UMass, Amherst has been organized as the Graduate
Employee Organization, UAW Local 2322, the working conditions of
graduate assistants have dramatically improved—as it will undoubtedly
for graduate students at NYU.
Heinrich Huber
Local News: 1 ·
2 · 3
· 4 · 5
