Union-Busting at the University of Michigan?
It sure looks like it. Pay particular attention to this comment; apparently the faculty member who fired the activist student without following proper procedures was an outspoken critic of unionization. And, disgracefully, the representative body of the UM faculty is also siding with the administration on the general issue. Most of them, I’m sure are nominal liberals. Liberals in the David Velleman/Ian Shapiro sense: i.e. illegitimate, exploitative hierarchies that we benefit from are perfectly OK!
do i catch a whiff of future civil rights lawsuit in the air? why, yes, i believe i do!
Faculty opposition to grad student unionization seemed both totally unsurprising and totally stupid to me when I was a grad student, and it continues to seem unsurprising and stupid to me now that I’m a tenured faculty member.
Then again, faculty opposition to faculty unionization seems totally unsurprising and totally stupid to me.
Or to put this in the apt terms of the last the line of Scott’s post: though some faculty benefit from the illegitimate, exploitative hierarchies of the university, most (e.g. the majority who are not on the tenure track) don’t, and over time, a smaller and smaller percentage of us do. Our tendency as faculty to cling to these hierarchies rather than coming up with ways to better leverage what power we have within the academy has been one of our great failures over the last few decades.
Yes. Very good diagnosis.
I put it with the same stupidity that keeps the medical profession from killing the 120 hour a week residencies. The idea that stupid hazing rituals (and really that is what this is) is so important to the profession that even questioning it is harmful to the fabric of professionalism.
Your information is several years out of date. 120 hour weeks in residency were against regulations at any accredited teaching hospital since over a decade ago (if they ever existed). And in July 2011, new regulations kicked in that limit them more.
So? I think you’d agree that it took decades of work to get those regulations adopted and not without opposition.
I know doctors who take a “kids these days” attitude to the supposedly mollycoddling cap of 80 hours a week.
Most people are fundamentally conservative, in the classical sense, not in the movement conservative or even any other modern political sense. Change is scary, even when it’s ridiculously obviously change for the better. A little propaganda goes a long way towards convincing people to oppose change that’s in their own interests, even when those people are members of the professoriate.
As a former UM unionized GSI (Graduate Student Instructor) from the 1990s, I’m a little surprised that the faculty Senate would take a position on this. They tended to support our job actions and negotiations though individual faculty results would vary. Since almost all GSRAs are in the Sciences and Engineering and those departments always had low participation rates in the union and less supportive faculty, I’m not surprised that the faculty Senate is being hostile. Also, I just don’t see how the 1981 case could be overturned, but I’m not a lawyer.
I was active in the GEO (the grad student union at Michigan) about a decade ago. Back then, there was wide variation in faculty support for the union. Some departments worked with their grad students and the union to make sure everyone’s rights were protected, others actively opposed any whiff of union activity. Not surprisingly, this often broke down along disciplinary lines: the physical sciences and professional schools (and econ) tended to take a hard line against unionization while the social sciences and humanities tended to work better with the union.
In addition, it should be noted that GEO has been trying to add RA’s to the negotiating unit since it’s founding (many, many decades ago.) In every new contract negotiation, GEO raises the issue and in every negotiation, the administration refuses to even discuss the topic. I think they have some legitimate concerns about the implementation of unionized RA’s (or, at least, they did back when I was there), but those concerns could be negotiated. The hostility to RA unionization probably stems at least in part to the fact that the disciplines most opposed to the union tend to be the ones that most intensively use RA’s. (Look at the compisition of the Faculty Senate committee that is linked: it’s also heavily physical science. One of the members is actually the professor who fired the grad student. I’m not sure I would assume that this committee is actually representative of the broader faculty’s preferences.)
My long ramble here is meant to say that the linkied story is clearly a problem, and the resistance to RA unionization is a longstanding issue, but the U of M is actually pretty good when it comes to grad student (and adjunct) unionization. Certainly the union is stronger and is treated more as a legitimate voice (even partner with the admin in some areas) than at any other university I’ve been associated with.
I suspect GEO has already been doing this, but they could point to other institutions in which RAs have been part of the bargaining units of other academic student employee unions. The unionization drive at UW started before I got there, but RAs were part of it from the get-go. After our union won its representation vote, the university tried to challenge the inclusion of RAs in the bargaining unit, making the typical claim that RAs were not employees because they were being paid to do their academic work. I’m oversimplifying a bit here, but our union’s response was twofold: 1) that RAs often do work that is not necessarily tied directly to their academic work and 2) whether or not they do work tied to their academic program, RA work greatly advances the research mission of the university and so they do work for the university in that sense. The state Public Employment Relations Commission, the body tasked with adjudicating such disputes, found our union’s argument convincing and sided with us that RAs must be included in the bargaining unit.
As a result, RAs at UW have been covered by a collective bargaining agreement since 2004. It’s worked, and as far as I know, there have been no significant institutional complaints about the impact of collective bargaining on the work or status of RAs here. RAs make up a very significant percentage of our membership, and most of the credit for that goes to the very active organizing that our local leadership does.
I do think that RAs should be in the bargaining unit with regards to things like health care etc.
I think there are a lot of important points here- the students that do teaching are unionized, and I think this is absolutely correct. Having RAs unionized is a little bit more tricky in terms of what this means for an advisor and how he/she can determine the nature of the lab/group. This is likely where the faculty reluctance comes in. If the union can help strengthen department rules/policies toward being able to terminate students within labs, that might be useful, but students must have a lab to get a degree in most sciences, but they are accepted to a department or college (in the States), so when they have to leave a lab they are in limbo unless they can get another lab. It isn’t clear how these things will be affected by a union.
I had no idea about Shapiro. Another intellectual hero tarnished. Goddammit.
I imagine this is what Randoids feel like when they find out Ayn took Social Security.
Yeah, it’s depressing. I’m a pretty big fan of his work, and use it quite a bit in my own.
Thanks for the correction. I arrived at UW after the first card drive, but before the 01 strike. I knew RAs who were involved in organizing, but maybe that was just starting when I got there.
Whoa. I was responding to djw’s comment about RA organization at UW, but that comment seems to have disappeared.
Huh. That’s odd. Well, the gist of it was that the original card drive and strike for recognition in 00-01 were instructional only, and RAs were added to the bargaining unit, IIRC, in late 2001. There had been some fear that they’d be less supporting as a group, and we really valued our 90%+ support amongst TAs, but once it was determined their support was nearly as high, including them wasn’t a problem. The administration tried to challenge it on specious grounds, and failed.
The challenges Pinko Punko alludes to are, indeed, real, but they’re not insurmountable, as the relatively unproblematic adjustment to unionized RAs at UW and elsewhere demonstrates.
I’ll also note here that RAs generally work long hours primarily for the benefit of faculty. I see no reason that they don’t deserve union representation.
That’s totally wrong Scott. RAs are working on their PhD dissertations in my field, which means that they are working to further their own careers in fundamental ways. It’s normal for faculty to also work long hours collaboratively with students.
You’re clearly not a research scientist. If you want to understand why there is such strong opposition to graduate student unions you have to start with how research is actually done.
For example, if there were elaborate restrictions on the hours that graduate students worked there is a completely predictable result.
Professors would hire postdocs instead. They are salaried, have already obtained a PhD, and tend to be a lot more productive than graduate students. They’re also not substantially more costly on a grant when you factor tuition into the picture (perhaps 50% more).
Of course, this means that you’re punishing the people who train the next generation of students. I’m sure that there’s some logic to this; I’m just not seeing what that logic is.
This is exactly the kind of bullshit that always creates a race to the bottom. Have any of these supposed terrible consequences happened in the places where RAs actually are unionized?
It’s worth noting that the same arguments were made for decades regarding medical interns; that the absurd overwork was absolutely necessary, etc etc. There’s been a fair amount of reform on this front, some stemming from unionization pressure, that has improved the situation dramatically. Strangely enough, we still seem to be able to train competent doctors while respecting the rights of their interns.
In general, your approach to this is an oddly unscientific way of approaching the question. You’re essentially saying claiming, not for the first time, that *this* employment sector is so special that we it can’t possible function if the lower-tier employees have the right to bargain for their own rights and protections. Given the extraordinarily poor track record of that particular claim, it seems reasonable to set the evidentiary bar fairly high. Instead of looking at how RA unionization has actually played out at UW or any of the other universities where it has taken place, or in other countries, you give an account of what you take to be the essence of unions and the essence of science, and how they would seem to not mix well. But of course science and unions aren’t essences, they’re flexible and diverse human practices that are considerably more adaptable than you seem capable of imagining.
I didn’t say any of those things.
I said that the claim that students are doing dissertation research “for the benefit of their professor” is a unsupportable assertion.
I get that the humanities is a different game, but the salaries, employment prospects, and general working conditions are not uniform across academe.
When the grad student union people were trying to organize in my department, many years ago, they were attempting to obtain employment conditions *substantially* worse than the ones that we already had.
And, yes, 120 hour work weeks are ludicrous. A mandatory 40 hour work week cap is not the only alternative.
Who has suggested a mandatory 40 hour work week cap?
And the professors get no benefit from the papers their students write – despite having their name on them. And their student’s research progress in no way effects the professor’s ability to get future grants/recognition/insight into how the universe works. Right.
Whether the primary benefit of the relationship falls to the student or adviser is variable and I think not particularly relevant. As other commenters haver pointed out, there are schools where RAs, even in the sciences, are unionized and yet the faculty continue to take on students and have productive research programs. Assuming that elaborate working hour restrictions and grievance resolution policies can be the only outcome of grad student organization is not supported by the evidence.
A mandatory 40 hour work week cap is not the only alternative.
I may have missed it, but I don’t see anyone claiming that it is.
With respect to RAs work benefiting the PI, Bijan Parsia said what I was about to. It’s true that an RA is working on her/his own educational and career advancement, but their work also contributes to the overall advancement of the group headed by the PI.
Even good working conditions can be undermined through cuts, etc. In our last round of contract negotiations, the university proposed significant cutbacks that would have affected all academic student workers, esp. in health care, but our union managed to get them to move away from that.
You’re right, it’s not, but the collective bargaining process can bring about alternatives and account for the realities of the academic workplace. Sometimes it’s dealt with at the negotiating table and sometimes it’s dealt with at the level of individual representation, e.g, a grievance.
A mandatory 40 hour work week cap is not the only alternative.
This is precisely what I meant when I suggested you were operating with hazy, unempirical conception of unions, rather than one based on the reality at universities in which RAs are members of unions. Unions are their members; at UW we polled our members, elected a bargaining team that represented TAs and RAs, and negotiated a contract. If, as you suggest, a hard mandatory 40 hour cap is utterly inconsistent with the successful functioning of this part of the university and RAs aren’t morons with no understand what they’re doing, the negotiating team will reflect these priorities, or risk a losing support when the vote for ratification occurs.
At the schools I have worked and been a student, the GRA contracts are for 20 hour work weeks, although that has little bearing on how much time is worked except on average.
I don’t know how feasible switching to post-docs would be. At least some of the funding agencies would, I think, tell you to rework your budget or just reject you, if you didn’t include students in said budget,
I don’t know about scientists, but engineering faculty generally don’t like grad student unions, because they hate unions in general or think they have no place in modern society.
Bill, the 20 hours is technically for “work” not the “thesis research” that is being done in the science and engineering departments by the same students on the same projects. The problem is that you cannot separate the “work” and the “thesis research” components.
You can for TAs and for RAs employed to do non thesis research research. No one has any problem with that part of the equation.
Ok, I was a PhD student in the humanities and now am in Computer Science (having observed things as a post doc and now as a faculty member). While it’s true that PhD students who are RAs often advance their own work, it’s equally true that 1) a lot of their own work contributes to e.g., grant goals, 2) they may be called on to do work which is not reasonably connected to advancing their PhD, and (most importantly) 3) research faculty members also generally work (for much better pay!) to further their career but are not thereby denied union representation.
(Graduated students is typically an important metric for any academic or departement (both in the UK and in the States completion, as well as employment, rates are a pretty big topic).)
I can’t see any reasonable way in which graduate students of any sort are deserving of less protection and representation than any other sort of worker. Given their vulnerability, I’d argue they need more.
Indeed, one of the common complaints of RAs, when we were organizing at UW, was being assigned to do too much work that was unrelated to their thesis, and not being given enough time to work relevant to their research such that they could graduate in a timely manner. They had no mechanism, other than finding a new lab and essentially starting over, to address this if their advisor was indifferent to their concerns. This is a fairly predictable consequence of the kind of power differential that exists in this environment without a counterweight such as a union.
“was being assigned to do too much work that was unrelated to their thesis”
That some students had that issue at UW doesn’t mean that unionizing grad students everywhere is the solution.
Where I was a grad student, the social science grad students were trying to unionize towards the end of my time there. The bio/chem/phys science students did not want the union because the conditions the union was trying to set up were worse than what we already had (probably a similar situation as Marc mentioned upstream). Our teaching load was not high (2 semesters total, 3 I think for the chem department) and in the very few cases were an advisor was indifferent (or caused) to a student’s situation, there were departmental grievance procedures set up.
The students had representation in every single departmental committee and we all knew each other. Something happening to a student got around quickly and was generally taken care of quickly, especially since most of the faculty was supportive of students as equals and not just bench rats.
Being unionized university wide would not only have destroyed this relationship by mixing or more likely eliminating many of our departmental policies, but would have brought in outside negotiators (UAW if I remember correctly) that were clueless (nothing like a putative union rep coming in to the lab and commenting how it was awful that the students had to teach every year).
The bio/chem/phys science students did not want the union because the conditions the union was trying to set up were worse than what we already had (probably a similar situation as Marc mentioned upstream).
This was an important (and for a time, effective) piece of anti-union propaganda at UW, but it wasn’t true, and it isn’t true at most other unionized universities. Engineering and some hard science students often got paid more, or otherwise better conditions and perks, and the union had no intention of changing that. But by negotiating a better “standard floor” or wages/conditions/benefits, most of the departments that were ahead of that were pushed up at the same rate.
Being unionized university wide would not only have destroyed this relationship by mixing or more likely eliminating many of our departmental policies, but would have brought in outside negotiators (UAW if I remember correctly) that were clueless
Not at all how UAW operated at UW. We elected our own negotiating team, UAW provided advisors who did not try to take over at all, and certainly didn’t attempt to create a one-size-fits all negotiating strategy, for the obvious reason that such a strategy would collapse support in the sciences and engineering and doom the union. This was the propaganda, but it had no significant connection to reality.
Precisely what djw said. This is Labor Studies/Relations 101: the presence of a union in an industry tends to increase wages and benefits in non-union workplaces, as employers seek to keep workers loyal.
At Michigan, you are guaranteed a set amount of money (and tuition and benefits) based on how much teaching you do in a semester. If a department wants to fund you without teaching, they can give you whatever they want. If a department wants to give you a fellowship on top of your teaching, they can give you as much as you want.
I don’t know of any union that says that all grad students must get paid the same amount or sets a maximum amount they can get paid. If any does do so, that is a stupid union and their leaders and negotiating team should be voted out of office by the members.
(I think it is true that science and engineering grad students have less to gain from unionization than humanities and (most) social science students because they generally get paid better than their peers without unionization. This doesn’t mean they are hurt by unionization.)
I’m not entirely sure why an increase in the numbers of post-docs per lab is such a miserable fate: in my area, at least, PhDs are grossly overproduced relative to job opportunities, primarily because grad students are used as a cheap and disposable form of labor.
“RAs are working on their PhD dissertations in my field.”
And you think there aren’t other fields where this might not be the case?
“Professors would hire postdocs instead. They are salaried, have already obtained a PhD, and tend to be a lot more productive than graduate students. They’re also not substantially more costly on a grant when you factor tuition into the picture (perhaps 50% more).”
Yes, because there’s never any exploitation of post-docs either.
Please parse
“And you think there aren’t other fields where this might not be the case?”
I suppose that by “Liberals in the David Velleman/Ian Shapiro sense” you mean “conservatives” and that by “disgracefully” you mean, or at least should add, “as usual in labor disputes with graduate students.”
Just to revise and extend: there’s no point in criticizing faculty for hypocrisy when they’re guilty of behaving like assholes.
In Shapiro’s case, that particular accusation (which does not preclude your alternative account) is tied very specifically to the purpose and content of the democratic theory he articulates and defends in his work.
Yes, either you don’t know Shaprio’s work or you don’t understand it.
No, I don’t know Shaprio’s work, but then, it was immaterial to my comment, and basically superfluous to your shoddy, elliptical post.
What was the point of your shoddy, elliptical comment?
Shapiro’s spent a large part of his thirty-odd year career arguing that rights and democratic theory needs to take into account the power relations that permit or hinder a given action or outcome. (He’s pretty caustic about it too, which is one of the reasons he’s fun to read). That has to qualify as “liberal” under any sensible definition of the term.
Shapiro has also been a powerful voice at his university against grad student unionization; in other words, he’s been an advocate against the institutional recognition of the power dynamics inherent in the relationship between professor/PI and grad student. (All this info is available in the first three google results for “Ian Shapiro”, or the link that Scott provided in the post).
So. Not only is Shapiro being an inconsistent liberal (pursuing a liberal research agenda while advocating for conservative employment practices at his university), he’s a powerful advocate for a position that runs completely counter to a large portion of his academic work.
A point well worth the making, and one that isn’t really captured by “Shapiro is a conservative who acts like an asshole in labor disputes with grad students the way most professors do.”
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Hmm, exactly how I’d describe CAP.
and by “CAP”, I meant TAP