NLRB Rules that Tens of Thousands of Teachers Do Not Actually Work

by Chris Bowers, Sat Jul 17, 2004 at 05:04:19 PM EDT

This case is personally crushing to me, since organizing graduate employees is not only how I have made a living for the past few months, but also because helping to organize the graduate employees at Temple University is what brought me back into the realm of political activism:The fast-growing movement to unionize graduate students at the nation's private universities suffered a crushing setback yesterday when the National Labor Relations Board reversed itself and ruled that students who worked as research and teaching assistants did not have the right to unionize.

In a case involving Brown University, the labor board ruled 3 to 2 that graduate teaching and research assistants were essentially students, not workers, and thus should not have the right to unionize to negotiate over wages, benefits and other conditions of employment.

The Republican-controlled board reversed a four-year-old decision involving New York University, a private institution, in which the board, then controlled by Democrats, concluded that graduate teaching and research assistants should be able to unionize because their increased responsibilities had essentially turned them into workers.

I lived off a TA's salary for five years. If I was able to teach in the summer, I managed to make around $14,500, with only a spatula health care plan. This was my compensation for teaching five courses with a total of around 120 students. There are tens of thousands of other people just like me throughout the country.

It is easy to exploit graduate employees, especially in the humanities where jobs are extremely scarce once you have obtained your degree. The lure of being a professor is strong: to study, discuss and teach important topics sounds like a pretty darn fulfilling way to live your life. However, with around 150 applicants for every full-time position in English alone, and with only around 10% of applicants receiving TA positions, if you don't take the deal you are given, thousands more will eagerly take your place.

Higher education has become ruled by a bottom-line mentality for too long now, and this ruling will only make things worse. For there to be any hope for the future, John Kerry must win this election so that the NLRB will no longer be controlled by union busting, corporate hacks. If you are a graduate student and you think your vote does not matter, and you believe that there is not enough of a difference between Bush and Kerry, look no further than this ruling. Bush just made your life a whole lot worse, but a Kerry administration would make it better.

And parents, keep in mind that when you send your kids to college for ludicrous amounts of money, remember that the learning conditions of your students are the working conditions of their teachers. Graduate students teach 1/3 of all courses at major universities, and ½ of all introductory courses. With Bush in office, you can never hope that your child is getting the education you are paying for.

Tags: Labor (all tags)

Comments

11 Comments

Sort by

permalink

Chris

Speaking as a retired professor I just wanted to say that my heart goes out to you. I did indeed find the life of a professor to be extremely satisfying and rewarding and I can imagine how much you must care about this issue. One of the reason I retired early was because of the increasing corporatization of university life and my feeling that I wanted to distance myself from the new values that these corporate types were introducing into the academic world. In my department (History) at my university (University of Rochester) graduate students were not exploited in the way you describe, but I know that what you say is absolutely correct for most universities (particularly the big ones) and it is likely to become increasingly the case if the corporate metality continues to gain ground as it will if Bush and Co. win.

I mostly just wanted to say - and I wanted to say this before this present posting - that your discussions and observations on this political race are really the best of any of the many things I read on the web. And I say that as a professional historian obsessed with politics and the current political situation. I hope you can get back to the academic world (if you have left it) because I am sure you would be very good at it, but what you are doing now is very important and you are doing it very well.

by herodotus 2004-07-17 07:03PM | 0 recs

permalink

Blushes

Gosh everyone, it sure it nice to come to a thread and read comments like these. Thank you all, and I am glad that history and social studies teachers are impressed with an English teacher's politcal analysis. :-)

by Chris Bowers 2004-07-18 11:27AM | 0 recs

permalink

NLRB Rules

TAs teach lab course which are not fluffy crud at all, and frequently teach the intoductory courses. I was TA for lab courses and intro courses. It was a load of work
Try doing your own coursework on top of that, it becomes extremely difficult.

The only thing that made it possible for me to do my grad work were the full ride scholarships i got for 2 years of my master's program and 2 years of my PhD program. Hallelujah.

TAs are what keeps research universities going.

by Carol 2004-07-18 12:02PM | 0 recs

permalink

Re: NLRB Rules

Technically, secretaries are what keep them going. When I was working on the grad student campaign at UIC in Chicago, the secretaries were also trying to organize, and we helped each other. We always said that the university worked because we do )meaing the GA's, RA's an TA's), but the truth is that if the secretaries walked out, the school would instantly grund to a screeching halt. Administrative assistants bascially run every large school.

by Chris Bowers 2004-07-18 12:59PM | 0 recs

permalink

Medical Residents, too

When my wife finished medical school she entered a surgical residency (Ob/Gyn) at the Univ of NM in Albq. She worked incredibly long hours with awesome responsibility, literally life and death sometimes. The first three years of that program we qualified for food stamps. Not until her chief year was her pay above the cutoff.

No, of course they were not in a union, yes the University was taking advantage, as they almost all do.

by phalanges 2004-07-18 03:32PM | 0 recs

permalink

Try the back door

I'm one of the lucky ones who landed a humanities job, but not until I went through a good six years in the adjunct game. These are the other unsung heros of academia -- often teaching double the load, taking large classes for courses that senior faculty don't want, low pay, no benefits, driving from school to school,... Academic migrant workers, freeway flyers, call them what you will, large universities especially, but certainly not exclusively, rely on them for cheap labor.

I wonder if the answer to this problem is to organize the adjuncts and then allow grad students to join that union or to at least to have the union bargain on their behalf.

by Steve G 2004-07-18 06:24PM | 0 recs

permalink

It's kind of a mixed bag

I've been both a TA and an RA, so I can see both sides of this issue--and I have a rather lengthy discussion of it on my blog.

But to quote my conclusion:

"All in all, though, I guess my position has to be that if any unionization is to take place--an idea I'm not entirely sold on in any case--it has to encompass both teaching assistants and research assistants. Otherwise, it's creating an even more unequal system than the one already in existence."

by baritenor 2004-07-19 02:28AM | 0 recs

permalink

Tuition Waivers

Not to burst the bubble here, but...

That $15,000 income doesn't include fee waivers. If you want grad students to be treated like employees, you might want to include the full costs of employment. Adding in the costs of annual tuition waivers, graduate student compensation rises sharply. At UCSD, instate graduate tuition is $8 a year, but out-of-state tuition (and a very large percentage of all graduate students go out-of-state) is $23K. So an effective income is closer to $40,000. And don't forget the taxes you save! If you had to pay for the tuition out-of-pocket, you'd need $40K after taxes, which means your effective income is actually closer to (if not over) $50,000. Oh the horrors of being middle class!
You don't have to TA. If you think your time is worth more than $50K a year, take a part-time job to pay the tuition (and taxes) and cover your expenses. I'm sure you'll have lots more than $15K left over. And, when you find that 20-hour-per-week part-time job that pays $50K to new college graduates with no useful experience, let me know. It'd be a paycut, but I'd sure love the extra time with my three small children.
Take out a loan. If you need more income, either because you're working too many hours to study or dissertate, or because you can't afford even a starving-college-student existence on $15,000 (books must be really expensive), there's always student loans. Of course, your choice of study may not actually promise enough future income to cover the additional loans, but that may say something important about the marginal utility of an additional English Ph.D.
Supply and Demand. There - said it. GSAs, TAs, RAs, and such are lucky to have these opportunities. Quit whining. If graduate programs offered good value for money (in terms of increased future earnings) there'd be no funding problem. If grad students thought the work-load was too high to justify the potential economic return, they'd decline the offers to TA, and they'd just do what nearly ALL law, medical, business, and other professional** students (who don't get the luxury of waivers and stipends) do: go to in-state schools, work part-time, work summers, take out loans, get grants or scholarships, live at home, get really frugal, ask your parents to help pay for it, and finish up early whenever possible.

If those are unpleasant options, then maybe current graduate students are getting far more value from their experiences than they admit. Networking for jobs and paper topics; building relationships with faculty and colleagues; the whole academic environment of freedom, discussion, and inquiry; and hands-on experience teaching and researching - these are all things that a few years of frugality may be worth.

**"professional" in this case refering to students of the professions, not peripatetic eighth-year ABDs whose advisors have forgotten about them.

All education should be more affordable - it is outrageous that states are stiffing students at all levels and including college undergraduates and graduate students. Just because the Boomers are out of school and heading for the nursing home, they seem to think public education is no longer needed. How convenient. But grad students are no different from students on scholarships: should scholarship or work-study undergrads have the right to unionize? Grad student reform should be addressed along with all other aspects of higher-education funding. Unionization is (in this case) idiotic.

by Silent E 2004-07-19 07:49AM | 0 recs

permalink

Re: Tuition Waivers

Just saw some of the other posts:

Keep in mind: If you're not a student, but rather an employee making $50,000+ a year, you're not going to get food stamps, housing assistance, income tax refunds (because your income is high enough that now you owe taxes), or any of the other public benefits that are out there. I know many students rely on these public programs, and there's little chance that unionization will make up the difference in lost benefits.

You'll also lose the "student" tickets at the movies or theater, and probably no longer be eligible for student tickets at football or basketball.

by Silent E 2004-07-19 07:57AM | 0 recs

permalink

Re: Tuition Waivers

1. That $15,000 income doesn't include fee waivers. If you want grad students to be treated like employees, you might want to include the full costs of employment. Adding in the costs of annual tuition waivers, graduate student compensation rises sharply. At UCSD, instate graduate tuition is $8 a year, but out-of-state tuition (and a very large percentage of all graduate students go out-of-state) is $23K. So an effective income is closer to $40,000. And don't forget the taxes you save! If you had to pay for the tuition out-of-pocket, you'd need $40K after taxes, which means your effective income is actually closer to (if not over) $50,000. Oh the horrors of being middle class!

If I had to pay the tuition out of pocket it would have meant that I wasn't a Temple employee. All Temple employees all allowed to take classes for free. This is the case at all schools. Further, the cost of 18 credits at Temple was around $8K a year--not the $35K you imply.

You don't have to TA. If you think your time is worth more than $50K a year, take a part-time job to pay the tuition (and taxes) and cover your expenses. I'm sure you'll have lots more than $15K left over. And, when you find that 20-hour-per-week part-time job that pays $50K to new college graduates with no useful experience, let me know. It'd be a paycut, but I'd sure love the extra time with my three small children.

You are right--I didn't have to be a TA. However, if I wanted to be a professor, I had to be a TA. Considering the competitive nature of the job searches, without higher level teaching experience, you are sunk.

Take out a loan. If you need more income, either because you're working too many hours to study or dissertate, or because you can't afford even a starving-college-student existence on $15,000 (books must be really expensive), there's always student loans. Of course, your choice of study may not actually promise enough future income to cover the additional loans, but that may say something important about the marginal utility of an additional English Ph.D.

I did. Thanks for the tip. It sure is nice that teacher need to go in debt in order to teach.

Supply and Demand. There - said it. GSAs, TAs, RAs, and such are lucky to have these opportunities. Quit whining. If graduate programs offered good value for money (in terms of increased future earnings) there'd be no funding problem. If grad students thought the work-load was too high to justify the potential economic return, they'd decline the offers to TA, and they'd just do what nearly ALL law, medical, business, and other professional** students (who don't get the luxury of waivers and stipends) do: go to in-state schools, work part-time, work summers, take out loans, get grants or scholarships, live at home, get really frugal, ask your parents to help pay for it, and finish up early whenever possible.

I agree completely. Abolish the public sector. Let supply and demand run unrequlated, and may the whiners shut up.

I worked part iotme. I worked summers. I took out loans. I was a Temple employee--I, like all workers, have the right to join a union. That is the issue here.

by Chris Bowers 2004-07-19 04:53PM | 0 recs

permalink

Re: Tuition Waivers

If all Temple grad students were treated as employees, Temple would have to stop letting ALL employees take classes for free. It's not free to the school. Providing "free" classes to janitors, secretaries, and other non-teaching staff is a cheap perk, since so few (relative to the size of the school) will utilize it. It costs far more to provide the classes and advising to grad students. By taking those classes, you are receiving compensation in kind. It may not be money, but it's not free.

As for the out-of-pocket, it it's $8K, then you'd only need to maker $23K (with a little extra for taxes - that's where the $35K came from).

Supply and demand. Not to be glib or insensitive (my wife got her Ph.D. recently from a large state school), but if teaching experience is required, then that experience is an additional benefit. But that's the case in all professions: the first jobs you get have VERY long hours of hard work with low pay so you get the crucial experience. Doctors, lawyers, congressional interns - you name it.

ME: Take out a loan.
CB: I did. Thanks for the tip. It sure is nice that teacher need to go in debt in order to teach.

That's true for all college students who can't get full scholarships or parental support, isn't it? Grade school teachers, computer programmers, business students, lawyers, and all the rest of us: education isn't free, and entry level jobs never pay well. Grad students are just faced with both facts at the same time.

I agree completely. Abolish the public sector. Let supply and demand run unrequlated, and may the whiners shut up.

No, let's not. Rather, let's restore funding to public schools and universities, cut tuition for ALL students, and try to give today and tomorrow's children the same good value that the Boomers got.

by Silent E 2004-07-20 04:38AM | 0 recs