Persuading grad students that unions aren’t just for longshoremen

The graduate students at the University of Illinois are fresh from victory. After a two-day strike last week at the Urbana-Champaign campus, university administrators reached an agreement with the union representing the students. Yesterday the students voted to ratify the agreement, which raised minimum pay, decreased healthcare premiums and, crucially, assured the university would continue to pay their tuition.

Getting a thousand people to strike doesn’t just magically happen. It particularly doesn’t just happen when the people in question are grad students, who – at least the ones I’ve known – spend a lot of time drinking, grading papers and stressing about their dissertations.

Higher education, whether it’s grad students or faculty, presents some special challenges to union organizers, said Chris Goff, an associate on the American Federation of Teachers’ higher education staff. Grad students and professors tend to see themselves differently. There’s an attitude of, “Why would I need a union? It’s for longshoremen.”

Some students also harbor reservations about joining a union because of the structure of graduate education, where a student works closely with a faculty adviser. They worry that straining that relationship could jeopardize not only their current job as a teaching or research assistant, but also their future chances in academia.

The crux of organizing grad students is getting them to buy into the idea of themselves not just as students, but as employees. On the one hand, they’re students, apprenticed almost to professors, learning by helping them conduct research. But they’re also workers, teaching classes, grading papers – in general, being “incredibly cheap and efficient labor for the university,” said Peter Campbell, the spokesman for University of Illinois’ union, the Graduate Employee Organization.

One way to make the case is to emphasize how being treated fairly as an employee makes it possible for them to flourish in their role as students. An overworked, underpaid TA is going to perish, not publish. 

“Higher education unions help define clear boundaries between our status as graduate employees and graduate students so we can be dedicated to both,” Campbell said.