FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT GRADUATE EMPLOYEE UNIONS

The Basics:
  1. Why graduate employee unions?
  2. What have graduate employees gained through unionizing?
  3. Which schools have recognized unions?
Getting Organized:
  1. How do i form a union?
  2. How do i find out more?
  3. Suggested Reading
Legal Issues:
  1. What are my rights?
  2. Public vs. Private Universities
  3. Union Rights of Graduate Employees by State

The Basics

WHY GRADUATE EMPLOYEE UNIONS?

Since the Teaching Assistants Association won their first contract with the University of Wisconsin in 1969, graduate student employees have been organizing, forming unions, and negotiating with their employers. There are now twenty-three unions -- comprising 30 official collective bargaining agents -- bargaining contracts covering graduate employees on more than 60 campuses; more than half of them have been recognized since 1990. There are currently campaigns on many campuses, as well as several unions fighting in states that do not yet recognize their right to union representation.

Teaching Assistants (TAs) and Research Assistants (RAs) are a crucial part of the higher education workforce. At major research universities, they teach up to 40% of undergraduate class hours and provide the technical expertise for ground-breaking research in fields ranging from developmental psychology to mechanical engineering. They form unions for the same reason as other workers: they want a voice in the decisions that affect their lives. Unionized workers meet with their employers as equals to negotiate wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. They take pride in their work, bargaining for training and professional development; and they work for social justice, addressing discrimination and accessibility to education.

If, in some distant time, graduate school was an apprenticeship and a Ph.D. was a ticket to a secure lifetime career, that time has gone the way of hula-hoops and backyard bomb shelters. In the past 25 years, it has become more difficult to complete a graduate degree: it takes longer (up to ten years on average in some fields) and more people drop out. (The national completion rate in Ph.D. programs is about 50% -- compared to 90% in professional degree programs.) Disciplines across the board have become more complex, demanding a detailed proficiency in theories, research methods, and technologies that were unheard of only a few years ago. Prospective employers demand publications and postdoctorate positions as prerequisites. At the same time, public support for public education has diminished and universities, turning to corporate models to maintain their bottom lines, have come to depend increasingly on Teaching Assistants and non-tenure-track adjuncts to teach undergraduate courses for a fraction of the salaries of their tenured colleagues. Teaching Assistants do more teaching while they're in graduate school, and they face poorer job prospects when they finish. For graduate students working hard to pay off undergraduate debt, prepare for a career, and support themselves & their families, the respect, higher wages, better benefits, and greater security of a union contract make the difference in their present and future professional lives.

At the same time, the United States is witnessing the rebirth of labor movement in which professional employees are joining workers of all kinds to assert their dignity and power in the face of downsizing, casualization, and the infiltration of the profit-motive into the professional world. Graduate employee unionists are proud to be a part of this growing social movement, affiliating with a wide range of international unions and uniting with industrial workers, healthcare workers, K-12 teachers, telecommunication workers, restaurant employees, custodians, and others in the fight for justice on the job. For example, much national media attention regarding graduate employee unions has focused on the ongoing struggle between the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) and Yale University. In many respects, this is because an elite private ivy league school naturally garners more publicity than a workaday campus like SUNY--Buffalo or the University of Kansas. In large part, however, the story at Yale that draws the New York Times is that graduate students -- even Yale graduate students -- have found in the labor movement a place as meaningful -- and sometimes more so -- than the university. This is not romanticism; through unions, graduate employees have for 30 years been claiming the value of their work in the classroom and the research lab -- while universities have too often faltered in asserting the importance of education and knowledge.

WHAT HAVE GRADUATE EMPLOYEES GAINED THROUGH UNIONIZING?

These are the contractual benefits. Graduate employees who are active in their unions also gain a sense of community, solidarity, and empowerment in their lives. They take part in vibrant democratic organizations. They develop connections not only outside their own departments and disciplines, but in their communities and in the national labor movement.

WHICH SCHOOLS HAVE RECOGNIZED UNIONS?

This is a historical list of the twenty-three recognized graduate employee unions in the USA. See the Contact List for a list that includes active campaigns in the USA and unions in Canada.

UNION and SCHOOL DATE RECOGNIZED AFFILIATION
TAA (Teaching Assistants' Association)
University of Wisconsin-Madison		 1969 AFT
GEO (Graduate Employees Organization)
University of Michigan		 1975 AFT
GTFF (Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation)
University of Oregon		 1976 AFT
GAU (Graduate Assistants United)
University of Florida		 1981 AFT & NEA
GAU (Graduate Assistants United)
University of South Florida		 1981 AFT & NEA
GAU (Graduate Assistants United)
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University		 1981 AFT & NEA
University of California System 1988 & 1999** UAW
GEO (Graduate Employee Organization)
University of Massachusetts-Amherst		 1990 UAW
GSEU (Graduate Student Employees Union)
State University of New York		 1992 CWA
MGAA (Milwaukee Graduate Assistants' Association)
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee		 1992 AFT
GEO (Graduate Employee Organization)
University of Massachusetts-Lowell		 1993 UAW
GTAC (Graduate Teaching Assistants' Coalition)
University of Kansas-Lawrence		 1995 AFT
COGS (Campaign to Organize Graduate Students)
University of Iowa		 1996 UE
GEOC (Graduate Employees Organizing Committee)
Wayne State University		 1998 AFT
CGE (Coalition of Graduate Employees)
Oregon State University		 1999 AFT
GSOC (Graduate Students Organizing Committee)
New York University		 2000 UAW
GEO (Graduate Employee Organization)
University of Massachusetts-Boston		 2000 UAW
TUGSA (Temple University Graduate Students Association)
Temple University		 2001 AFT
GEU (Graduate Employees Union)
Michigan State University		 2001 AFT
Graduate Assistants United / URi-AAUP
University of Rhode Island		 2002 AAUP
Graduate Employees Organization / AFT
University of Illinois -- Urbana-Champaign		 2002 AFT
GRADUATE STUDENT EMPLOYEES IN UNIONS WITH FACULTY:
Rutgers Council of AAUP Chapters
Rutgers University		 1972 AAUP
Professional Staff Congress
City University of New York		 1968 AFT / AAUP

**Recognized for readers, tutors, and acting instructors at Berkeley in 1988; recognized for other classifications on all campuses in 1999; UAW 2865 is an amalgamated local union comprised of eight collective bargaining agents: AGSE-UAW at Berkley; AGSE-UAW at Davis; SWU-UAW at Irvine; SAGE-UAW at UCLA, CASE-UAW at Riverside; ASE-UAW at UCSB; ASE-UAW at UCSC; and ASE-UAW at San Diego.

GETTING ORGANIZED

HOW DO I FORM A UNION?

A labor union is a group of workers who organize themselves and act collectively to gain respect, power in their workplace, and a voice in their working conditions.

Some employees are entitled by law to collective bargaining rights, which means that their employers are obliged by law to enter into good-faith negotiations with them for the purpose of negotiating legally binding contracts. Where employees are not entitled to collective bargaining rights under the law, in most instances nothing prohibits employers from recognizing unions and negotiating with them.

There are two ways to gain union recognition from an employer: 1) win a labor-board certified election; 2) convince the employer to recognize your union through member mobilization, public pressure, and/or a strike. The latter is called "voluntary recognition" (and was the only way unions won recognition before collective bargaining law was established in the 1930's). Although some graduate employee unions have been recognized voluntarily by university administrations, they have eventually sought "official" recognition through an election. Voluntary recognition campaigns may be necessary in situations in which your right to an election is not yet established. (See legal FAQ on collective bargaining rights.) Most union election campaigns in the USA look something like this:

Where board recognition is impractical or impossible, unions may mimic this process, conducting a card drive and asking a third party to conduct an election -- and thus seeking to pressure the employer into recognizing the union voluntarily. A union does not need to be recognized or even to negotiate a contract in order to be effective and make substantial changes. Graduate teachers at Yale, for example, recently received a 20% raise.

HOW DO I FIND OUT MORE?

If you want to start your own graduate employee union, your best resources are union activists at organized (and currently organizing) schools. These people want to help you, and they will often come and visit you or invite you to events on their campuses. They can run workshops and training sessions, help with events, speak at meetings, work on elections, etc. (Their unions will in some circumstances pay their travel and expenses for these activities.) You'll find lots of contact info on the CGEU Contact List. If you want to contact me (Jon Curtiss) about information on this site, you can reach me at .

The CGEU also holds an annual two-day conference every summer. We run workshops on organizing, bargaining, running union campaigns, etc. and always have a lot of fun. This is a great place to meet people, ask questions, and get a crash course in everything you need to know about graduate employee unions. General requests for information can be sent to the CGEU e-mail list (), which includes about 125 graduate employee union activists in the USA and Canada. You can join this group (and receive unmoderated news postings and occasional discussion) by sending your address to Trip McCrossin at .

The Directory of Graduate Student Employee Bargaining Agents and Organizations contains backgrounds, histories, and contract summaries of graduate employee unions in the USA. It's completely out of date. Does someone want to revise it?

SUGGESTED READING

LEGAL ISSUES

WHAT ARE MY RIGHTS?

Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, proclaims that "Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions." In the United States, however, not all workers have the same rights to union representation, and the laws and procedures protecting the right to organize are weak. Agricultural and domestic workers, for example, are excluded from the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which gives workers in the private sector the right to win representation through a union election, as are temporary employees and other workers. Approximately 40% of public sector employees are also denied this right; fourteen states explicitly exclude public sector employees from collective bargaining.

The union rights of public sector graduate employees vary from state to state; the rights of graduate employees at private universities have been established by a legal decision at New York University

No law, however, prohibits workers from acting collectively and pressuring their employer for better benefits, salary increases, social justice, or anything else. This right is protected by the Constitution. In states in which the law regarding graduate employees is uncertain or in which graduate employees are excluded from collective bargaining rights, it is possible to change the law -- and some graduate employee unions have done just that.

PUBLIC VS. PRIVATE

In the United States, employees at private companies and universities are governed by one set of federal laws (the NLRA), which are administered by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB); public employees (like TAs and RAs at state universities) are governed by individual state labor laws, administered by state labor boards. Each state has different laws about who can unionize, what kinds of dues and fees they can charge, etc. Some states, misleadingly called "right-to-work" states, prohibit unions from collecting representation, or "fair share," fees from non-members covered by the contract. (Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as 'right to work.' It provides no rights and no work. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining. We demand this fraud be stopped.") In some states, university employees are explicitly excluded from collective bargaining law!

When graduate employees try to unionize, they usually have to fight a legal battle to prove that they are in fact workers who have the right to a union, and not simply students who teach and do research as part of a financial aid package. This battle has been fought and won by TAs at many public universities, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Oregon, and UMass. This past year, graduate employees in Illinois and Pennsylvania won battlles in their respective states. (In Wisconsin, Michigan, Massachusetts, and California, graduate employee unions negotiated agreements covering working condition, wages, and benefits without being recognized by a state labor board.)

Until very recently, the NLRB had never ruled on the status of graduate student employees, which as meant that TAs at private universities faced a daunting legal battle with no certain outcome if they tried to unionize.

While graduate employees at one private university -- members of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) at Yale -- have been engaged in a bitter fight for union recognition with the Yale Administration for eight years, GESO (affiliated with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union) has been demanding that the Administration recognize them voluntarily, and has not put the question of their employee status before the board by filing an election petition. (The issue did come under consideration when, in response to the intimidation and harassment of TAs who withheld grades in a well-publicized grade strike, GESO filed a complaint with the NLRB, arguing that the Yale Administration had violated federal labor law by retaliating against lawful union activity. The Yale Administration countered, of course, that the TAs were students, not employees, and thus had no protection from their "disciplinary" action. The NLRB General Counsel did decide that a complaint charging Yale with unfair labor practices should be filed, but a subsequent ruling found in favor of Yale on technical grounds: TAs were conducting a "partial strike," which is not protected activity under the law. The ruling came to no definitive conclusion about the student/worker status of Yale TAs.)

In 1999, members of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (affiliated with the United Auto Workers) filed an election petition for graduate employees at New York University, also a private university. In April 2000, an NLRB regional director ruled unequivocally that graduate assistants at NYU are employees, are covered under the National Labor Relations Act, and thus eligible to vote in a union election under the auspices of the NLRB. The decision ordered an election for GSOC, which was conducted later in the same month.

The NYU Administration appealed the decision, and the ballots for the GSOC election were impounded and not counted until a decision was issued on the appeal in November, 2000 by the full NLRB in Washington. Once again, the board handed the union a decisive victory, reaffirming the original decision and ordering that the ballots be counted. The final count was a resounding "Union 'Yes!'"

The GSOC decision (the text of which is available in html and as a pdf file at the NLRB Website) is notable in that Research Assistants, excluded from bargaining units at some public universities by state labor boards, are included in the bargaining unit:

"Included: All teaching assistants, graduate assistants, research assistants, (including teaching fellows, research fellows, Metro Center tutors, and preceptors)...employed by New York University."

The ruling excludes:

"...graders and tutors, graduate assistants at the Sackler Institute and those research assistants funded by external grants in the Physics, Biology, Chemistry and the Center for Neuroscience (CNS) Departments, and guards and supervisors as defined by the Act."

Graders and tutors are excluded because they are ruled temporary employees:

"[T]he parties stipulated that they receive appointments lasting from one week to one semester and that cash disbursements related to these activities vary according to academic department policy....[T]heir employment is sporadic and irregular....Thus, graders and tutors are temporary employees."

The excluded RAs are not included in the unit according to the following logic:

These GAs and RAs have no expectations placed upon them other than their academic advancement, which involves research. They receive stipends and tuition remission as do other GAs, RAs, and TAs, but are not required to commit a set number of hours performing specific tasks for NYU...The research they perform is the same research they would perform as part of their studies in order to complete their dissertation, regardless of whether they received funding. The funding...therefore, is more akin to a scholarship.

Note that the funding source is not the issue, but depends simply on a common sense definition of what it means to be employed:

The Employer notes that there are RAs in Psychology, Economics and the Stern School whose stipends are also funded by faculty research grants. However, it appears from the record that the RAs in these departments are assigned specific tasks, and that they work under the direction and control of the faculty member, as opposed to the Sackler GAs and the science RAs who are working on their own dissertation.

Now that the struggles at NYU and Yale have resulted in a definitive ruling of the legal rights of graduate employees at private universities, the door is open for organizing drives across the country.

UNION RIGHTS OF GRADUATE EMPLOYEES BY STATE

The Collective bargaining rights of graduate employees at public universities (as governed by individual state labor laws) can be divided into five categories. (Thanks to Perry Robinson of the American Federation of Teachers for this information.)

  1. States in which graduate employees are explicitly eligible for collective bargaining under the law:

    California Florida Illinois Iowa Kansas Massachusetts¹
    Michigan Minnesota New Jersey New York Oregon Pennsylvania
    Rhode Island Wisconsin²

    ¹ UMass-Amherst recognized GEO following an adverse ruling by the state labor board. GEO/Lowell TAs subsequently took their case before the Labor Board and, when the University did not oppose them, were granted a board certified election.

    ² After ten years of negotiating agreements without official collective bargaining agent status, the TAA in Wisconsin ran a legislative campaign in the early 1980's to explicitly include graduate employees under the law.

  2. States in which university employees are eligible under the law, but in which the eligibility of graduate student employees is uncertain:

    Alaska Connecticut Delaware Hawaii Maine Montana
    Nebraska New Hampshire New Mexico South Dakota Vermont

  3. States in which university employees are eligible, but in which graduate employees and part-time faculty are explicitly excluded:

    Ohio

  4. States in which K-12 and two-year college faculty are eligible, but in which all university level employees are excluded:

    Washington

    Note: GSEAC-UAW recently won recognition from the Administration at the University of Washington, but not as an exclusive representative; the issue remains unresolved.

  5. States in which all university employees are excluded from collective bargaining rights:

    Alabama Arizona Arkansas Colorado Georgia Idaho
    Indiana Kentucky Louisiana Maryland Mississippi Missouri
    Nevada North Carolina North Dakota Oklahoma South Carolina Tennessee
    Texas Utah Virginia Wyoming

    Note: In some of these states (e.g. North Carolina) collective bargaining is actually prohibited, in others voluntary recognition is not impossible. Members of GALOL at the University of Maryland have been pushing for legislation that would give them union rights