In a previous Viewpoint, I discussed the state of the labor movement in the U.S., with a specific look at U.S. universities' role in this widespread assault on labor in this country. Specifically, I examined Tufts relations with its janitorial staff, which, through outsourcing, Tufts has managed to shamefully exploit at an increased rate in recent years, despite the continued efforts of the janitors, their union and Tufts' own Student Labor Action Movement.
In this Viewpoint, I would like to discuss how such university administrator efforts to undermine the rights and the security of its workers go beyond the exploitation of the janitorial staff. Academic labor, too, has been affected. Indeed, as universities have since the 1970s increasingly been replacing tenure track professorships with part-time, low paying and often no-benefit, one-year renewable adjunct positions. They also use the low-cost labor of graduate students, who frequently work as lecturers, teaching assistants, research assistants, post-docs, and graders.
Right here at Tufts, for instance, every semester, between 400 and 500 graduate students work for the university, often in excess of 20 hours per week, on top of whatever classes or independent research they may be pursuing. As TAs and RAs, we teach dozens of classes, run labs and recitations, grade papers and exams, hold office hours every week, and perform valuable university research.
For this work, some graduate TAs are paid as low as a few thousand dollars per course, while many others make around $12,000 per year for teaching multiple full-credit undergraduate courses. As Boston is one of the most expensive cities in the country to live in, many grad students find that their stipends as TAs and RAs fail to meet their basic living needs.
While conditions and compensation vary a great deal between departments, no graduate student employees currently have their health insurance paid for by Tufts, despite the fact that Tufts depends on their healthy bodies to sustain undergraduate courses.
Additionally, many lack the necessary institutional support, such as office space or phone and computer access.
The Association of Student Employees at Tufts (ASET), of which I am a member, has been working since Fall 2001 to build a graduate student employee union here at Tufts - which would improve our working conditions, increase our respect and compensation, and give us a real voice at this university. As we enter the fall of 2004, we still feel that, by coming together across departmental lines, we can raise the profile of grad labor on this campus and negotiate a union contract with the Tufts administration that will make this University a better place to work and to learn. Our working conditions, after all, are undergraduate learning conditions!
While we have appealed to the university to recognize ASET as a grad student union, the Tufts Administration has continued to maintain a self-serving line of argument. Just as it has disowned the janitors as the employees of an outside firm, so it continues to deny that graduate student workers are employees of this university. In the administration's official view, we are strictly "students," not "employees."
On the contrary, we at ASET contend that hundreds of graduate students are both students and employees; in addition to taking courses and pursuing our own research, we provide valuable and essential services to Tufts - services for which we are paid, in dollars which are taxed.
Tufts administration, like university administrations across the country, has spent thousands of dollars appealing to the National Labor Relations Board on grad student employees' right to vote to form a union. Although Tufts grad student employees voted on unionization more than two years ago, our ballots still have not been counted. In effect, Tufts has - with the help of George W. Bush's labor board appointees - denied hundreds of grad student workers at this institution the democratic right to unionize. However, grad unionization can frequently be liberating to both the professors and the grad students involved, while at the same time improving the quality of graduate teaching in undergrad classrooms by better supporting hard working TAs.
The Tufts administration would like us all to think otherwise. They would like us all to believe that grad students do not work at this University, that we are put into undergrad classrooms merely for our own benefit, not to educate Tufts undergraduates. Hard-working and committed Tufts TAs and graders know better. Despite Tufts' costly appeal strategy of arguing semantics to the NLRB in Washington, there is still no getting around the fact that Tufts works in part because we do. The fact is that grad students at this University teach dozens of courses each semester, lead hundreds of lab and discussion sections, and hold thousands of office hours per month.
By building our graduate employee union, ASET, and by getting the administration to recognize our union in the months ahead, Tufts grads can gain a more well-respected and influential voice at this University. Unionization, as discussed in my prior article, has long been a powerful tool for workers seeking to increase wages and benefits and to gain a say in their working conditions.
Graduate unions have been instrumental in winning full and free healthcare coverage, workload protections, international student protections, and additional institutional support for the research and teaching work of their members. I encourage all undergrads reading this to recognize the labor of your TAs, and to support them in their right to unionize. I hope that graduate student employees reading this article will take it upon themselves to learn more about ASET's ongoing union campaign, and to get involved in the struggle to improve our working conditions at this univerisity. See our website (http://www.tuftsgrads.org) for more discussion and information about our ongoing union campaign.
Joe Ramsey is a PhD. student, a grader in the English Department, and an organizer for ASET/UAW, the Association of Student Employees at Tufts/United Auto Workers, the group working to form a graduate student employee union at Tufts.
