Graduate Students Gather to Learn 'Organizing 101'
Unions see new academic year as a crucial one for their efforts

MADISON, WIS. The graduate student from the University of Washington conceded that he and a dozen of his colleagues back in Seattle didn't have a clue about how to form a union. "We're total know-nothings, and no one knows we exist," he told the crowd at the annual meeting of the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions.

He had come to the right place for an education.

About 75 leaders of the movement to unionize graduate assistants gathered from around the country this month to teach organizing tactics to newcomers, like the Washington student, and to plot strategies for what they expect to be a crucial year in their campaign.

Graduate students at 20 universities in the United States already have collective-bargaining units, union organizers say. Students at 15 institutions are campaigning for recognition of their unions, and their counterparts at a dozen others, including the Universities of Chicago and Georgia, have formed groups to discuss organizing unions.

The union-recognition drives are where the action is, and people packed into rooms during the conference here to talk about some of those battles:

• Graduate assistants on seven campuses of the University of California have authorized a strike this fall should administrators continue to deny recognition of their unions, which are affiliated with the United Auto Workers. A state labor board is expected to rule soon on whether teaching assistants at California's Los Angeles campus are students or employees.
  
  
• Members of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale University are awaiting a decision from the National Labor Relations Board on whether graduate assistants at the private institution qualify as employees. The case, which stems from a grade strike two years ago, is on appeal. Its outcome could have a major impact on whether more graduate assistants move to unionize at private colleges. Last spring, more than 1,000 graduate students signed a GESO-sponsored petition urging Yale to negotiate a binding agreement with graduate students. The administration returned the petition to the graduate-student organization with a note saying that Yale does not recognize GESO.
  
  
• Graduate assistants at the University of Minnesota last week kicked off a six-month campaign to gain recognition for their union, the Graduate Student Organizing Congress. The union needs about 1,000 students to sign membership cards before an election can be held. Leaders of the effort say a victory in such an election would make the Minnesota union the country's largest bargaining unit for graduate students, with nearly 4,000 teaching and research assistants represented.
  
  

Tamara Joseph is a paid organizer for the Minnesota union and a former graduate student at Yale, where she helped to organize for GESO. Those ties make both campaigns personally important to her. But it's the imminent action in California that excites her more. "What they are about to pull off this fall is going to be beyond anything that we've seen yet," she said.

She expects the coalition of unions to play a supporting role in the drive by University of California graduate students. Some of them were here plotting strategy, although they declined to make public their strike plans.

Last year, members of the coalition flooded the fax machines of some California administrators with the message "Recognize the Union Now." (Some recipients faxed the message back with an appended note: "Get a Life.") This year, Ms. Joseph said, members of the coalition may send organizers to California to help with the campaign.

"It's useful for our unions to be engaged in support for the struggle in California, because they're expanding the realm of the possible for graduate employees," she said.

The Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions is a loose-knit group that started meeting seven years ago. It has no formal membership or structure, although participants at this year's conference agreed to set up a site on the World-Wide Web so that both fledgling and established unions could communicate better. As it is, because graduate-assistants' groups are affiliated with different national and international unions -- such as the American Federation of Teachers, the Communications Workers of America, and the United Auto Workers -- and because the groups are at various stages of formation, the coalition's annual conference serves as the one time that unionized and union-minded teaching assistants come together each year.

The two-day meeting was sponsored, in part, by the Teaching Assistants' Association, an A.F.T. affiliate on Wisconsin's Madison campus, and it drew more people from more U.S. campuses -- 21 -- than ever before. The union helped pay the way for representatives of budding organizations, like the one that students are quietly forming at the University of Washington.

Mary Jane Curry, a co-president of the Wisconsin union and an organizer of the coalition meeting, said the increased attendance showed that "graduate assistants are really an incredibly exploited group. They're just realizing that they can change their condition, and that there are people out there willing to help them."

Administrators at Yale, California, and many other institutions hardly view graduate students as an exploited bunch. The officials note that students often receive stipends or tuition waivers. In any event, says Brad Hayward, a spokesman for the University of California system, the bottom line is that "graduate assistants are first and foremost students, whose duties are directly tied to their education and career goals." Yale endorses that view.

The National Labor Relations Board has concurred. But its regional office in Connecticut, which is overseeing the Yale case, has asked the national board to reconsider its stance. The Connecticut office has appealed the decision of an N.L.R.B. judge who found that the grade strike was illegal because it amounted to a partial strike; the students had not stopped all of their work. But even he noted that the teaching done by Yale graduate assistants "contributes little toward the body of knowledge they must acquire" for a Ph.D. The judge's ruling also noted that students in one department are often hired as teaching assistants in another, so that "however significant their teaching functions may be to their own educational progress and career plans, it is abundantly clear that the teaching fellows are a major resource for the University in providing undergraduate education."

On some campuses, teaching assistants spend as much time teaching in the classroom as full-fledged faculty members do.

Many attending the conference said their unions were concerned with bread-and-butter issues -- better wages and improved health care. Other unions had a broader agenda and were pushing for things like teacher training.

The conference featured a series of workshops covering a range of subjects that included basic organizing techniques and strike planning. In a session called "Organizing 101," members of the union at Minnesota carried out a role-playing exercise, demonstrating how to persuade a reluctant chemistry student to sign a card calling for a union election. The session was instructive for many people in the packed room, but it was more than an exercise for the Minnesota students: Last week, they kicked off a six-month-long drive for just such signatures. The union plans to collect 2,500 cards, more than twice the number required to hold an election.

The University of Minnesota's union has been aggressive about signing up students in the "hard sciences," typically a tough bunch to organize.

Research assistants in the sciences don't have the same financial incentive for unionizing as teaching assistants do. For one thing, they are usually paid more -- about $15,000 a year in some fields, twice as much as many teaching assistants in the humanities earn.

Nonetheless, the union has had some success organizing the young scientists, signing up about one new member for every two it contacts. The organizers tell the students that they may enjoy the good life now, at a time when the university is flush, but that only a union contract can lock in benefits for when the tide changes.

The Minnesota organizers said they learned a lot from their counterparts at Wayne State University, where graduate assistants won union representation in April with the backing of lots of graduate students in the sciences -- most notably, physics. Wayne State union leaders shared their tips at a session titled "Organizing in Science Departments."

The union organizers have become proselytizers for their movement. A paid organizer who worked for Wayne State is now working for GESO at Yale. In turn, GESO is sharing its ideas with teaching assistants at New York University, who recently affiliated with the United Auto Workers.

Yale officials weren't surprised about the collaboration of graduate-student unions. "I would have assumed that they had been doing that sort of thing for a while now," said Tom Conroy, a Yale spokesman. "It's my impression that that group of students at Yale who are the main supporters of a union, of employee status for themselves, believe it would be worthwhile everywhere."

In fact, many campus organizers have built bonds with other labor unions. Graduate assistants in California actively supported the Teamsters' strike against United Parcel Service last year, and have supported actions by the Justice for Janitors union, said Ricardo Ochoa, a law student and union leader on the Berkeley campus. In turn, Mr. Ochoa said, he hoped that those workers would show support if graduate assistants walk off their jobs this fall. He promised that such a strike would be "significantly more disruptive than past strikes."

Mr. Ochoa and Mike Miller, a paid organizer for the Student Association of Graduate Employees, at the University of California at Los Angeles, helped to lead the session that drew the biggest crowd -- "Campaigning for Voluntary Recognition from a Hostile Administration."

This was Mr. Miller's fourth year at the conference. "A bunch of hope is what you get when you come here," he said. "You get revved up to take it back to U.C."

Copyright © 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education