Print
Legislatures in two states are considering bills that would allow academic workers the right to choose collective bargaining. On Feb. 19, the Wisconsin State Senate voted 21 to 12 for legislation that would allow faculty and academic staff employed across the University of Wisconsin system to form unions. And the next day, a committee in the Maryland House of Delegates heard testimony from University of Maryland graduate employees on a bill that would give them and adjunct faculty collective bargaining rights.
The Wisconsin Senate vote represents years of effort by the Association of University of Wisconsin Professionals (TAUWP), one of AFT's oldest nonbargaining locals. "Collective bargaining rights are currently enjoyed by academic staff and faculty in the public universities of each of Wisconsin's border states," says TAUWP president Mark Evenson. By extending those rights to academics within the state, UW "can only stand to gain in recruitment and retention."
The collective bargaining rights bill would affect 17,000 workers in the four-year system and could allow up to 31 separate bargaining units. State law already gives faculty and staff in the two-year and technical colleges the right to unionize.
While the state Senate vote to pass the bill was bipartisan, the companion legislation in the Wisconsin Assembly faces a tough battle from the Republican majority in that chamber.
 |
| Maryland grad employees Devin Ellis and Laura Moore confer in the Annapolis statehouse before testifying in support of collective bargaining. |
Laura Moore, president of the UM Graduate Student Government, described how "time and again, financial considerations interfere with academics" at the university. She noted that a university committee was formed last year to study why the Ph.D. completion rate at the College Park campus was just 48 percent.
Among the reasons they found were workload and compensation challenges. The workload of teaching assistants, touted by the administration as 20 hours a week, is closer to 30. Graduate employees teach all the freshman English 101 courses, averaging two sections a semester with 23 students each, who write at least five papers during the semester. "Many English 101 TAs are forced to take 'incompletes' in their own courses in order to accommodate their teaching and grading workload," Moore said. She added that the teaching work assignments of TAs in the humanities and the sciences often are not related to their disciplinary studies.
 |
| Maryland SGA president Laura Moore shows legislators the numbers on why grad employees need bargaining rights. |
Another challenging issue for the graduate employees, she said, was paying College Park rents, which run about $925 per month, on an average $13,826 annual stipend. So dire is the challenge of living on grad assistant wages, said former public school teacher Asha-Lateef Dobbs, that she and other grad assistants feel the lure of abandoning their dreams for the call of steady wages.
The Maryland House legislation parallels a bill introduced Feb. 3 by state Sen. Jamie B. Raskin, a professor of constitutional law at American University. "All the graduate students are asking for is a seat at the table," he told the Washington Post. "No one is ever going to get rich being a graduate student, but there should be a decent level of support for graduate students and adjunct faculty."
The legislation faces a tough challenge from the University of Maryland, which contends that graduate employees are students, not workers.
"Ladies and gentlemen," said Devin Ellis, chairman of the University System of Maryland Student Council, "I submit to you that the state comptroller signs my paychecks, I pay employee deductions, I am eligible for a state employee health plan, and I am expected to perform certain services in exchange for certain payment. If that isn't an employer-employee relationship, I don't know what is."
February 21, 2008
