back to it

Exam writing is over! I have my candidacy defense next week on May 17th. I’m feeling remarkably zen about the whole thing right now, which I’m sure will change by this weekend…

Interesting news from out in California, where the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union slate of candidates completely took over the Joint Council of the United Auto Workers local 2865. News here and here.

Also, apparently US Republicans are trying to declare perpetual war on no one. At least the post-9/11 declaration explicitly stated the US was going after the perpetrators of 9/11. More here.

And the North African to EU migration flow is heating up; both Italy and France have made some waves lately. And now it seems that NATO, the Italian Coastguard, and others are letting migrant-filled boats sink (here).

some dangers of organizing through .edu email

So there’s been this big flap in Wisconsin over the fact that a university professor had the audacity to point out that the legislation to eliminate public unions wasn’t original to Wisconsin, and in fact is part of the strategic plan of many right wing “advocacy” groups. Republicans responded by filing a FOIA request to access all of historian Bill Cronon’s emails. A fellow blogger, Tenured Radical, posted a few FYI’s that I thought I should repost here about how your .edu email address, university computer, and university office are NOT YOURS and you have no expectation of privacy.

• Your university email account belongs to the university. While Bill Cronon is being persecuted by a bunch of right wing Republicans determined to reduce the American working class to pre-industrial conditions, technically your employer can enter your email account whenever it chooses.  This means that we should all be careful what we say when we write from, or to, an edu address.  In fact, it isn’t such a terrible idea to add your gmail or yahoo account to the signature line of your university account requesting that all personal communication be sent there.
• People (including students) who work in IT can get access to your university email through the web server whenever they want to.  They shouldn’t, and they probably don’t, but they are capable of it.  Don’t put anything in an email that you would not want circulated.  This includes personal matters (sex), conflict with colleagues, and correspondence about personnel cases that reveals any information that you, the department, the referees, or the candidate might consider private.
• The computer you are assigned by the university belongs to the university, and they can search it at any time.  They can also search your office without a warrant. According to FindLaw, unless you are covered by a state law or a union contract that prohibits such searches, “Employers can usually search an employee’s workspace, including their desk, office or lockers. The workspace technically belongs to the employer, and courts have found that employees do not have an expectation of privacy in these areas.  This is also the case for computers. Since the computers and networking equipment typically belong to the employer, the employer is generally entitled to monitor the use of the computer. This includes searching for files saved to the computer itself, as well as monitoring an employee’s actions while using the computer (eg, while surfing the internet).”  Does this mean that we should all be thinking about buying a home computer for all activities we wish to ensure privacy for — downloading pornography, getting divorced, blogging?  Maybe.  And technically, the university could prohibit you from blogging on the computer they provide, although arguably this would be an infringement of academic freedom.
• You can’t be sure you have erased something from a computer or a server. In fact, according to Daniel Engber of Slate, you can be pretty sure that you can’t erase anything permanently, even if you use a utility like Evidence Eliminator.  And even if you could, those emails that you sent are now on someone else’s computer, someone else’s server, and so on.  They are retrievable.
• The Republican Party is owned and operated by vicious thugs who abuse their power to make us all into corporate servants and lackeys for capitalist special interests. This has nothing to do with computers:  I thought I would just throw this in.  But we are reminded that there is a long  history for this sort of activity in the United States:  in the late 1830s, for example, the southern slaveocracy pushed for national legislation to censor abolitionist literature. When they didn’t get it, beginning with South Carolina, they passed state laws that allowed local officials to seize these materials and open the mail of private citizens.  The parallel is obvious, isn’t?  Freedom to have absolute power over labor > constitutional right to free speech.  It’s a good thing the Grimke sisters didn’t have an email account.

 

GESO emerging trends in higher education panel remarks

This past Monday, February 21, I sat on a panel for a discussion entitled “Emerging Trends in Higher Education: The Changing Face of Academia.” Below are my remarks.

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First, I’d like to thank Franco, Valerie, Maria, and Chris for helping us contextualize the GESO struggle. It is imperative that we link what goes on at Ohio State with what is occurring internationally and with the trends and patterns nationally. Ignoring our links to Tunisia or Wisconsin, Italy or California opens up a space to further sediment our exploitation.

I use this word, exploitation, consciously and hopefully it is unsettling. As the other panelists have shown us, the translation of graduate employee positions to secure, tenured positions with the academic freedom, flexible schedule, and intellectual fulfillment that the vast majority of us want is not happening. What these panelists have helped us realize, I hope, is that without action on our part, here, now, then our positions as graduate employees is doomed to a permanence that shifts our experiences from the realm of a willingly experienced apprenticeship to the first stage of an exploitative relationship that will continue for our entire careers.

But we have a unique opportunity to change this outlook. The emergence of international and national struggles against the global regime of an educational paradigm driven by debt, decreasing opportunities to translate the new discourse of instrumental degrees into employment, and the elimination of rights for public workers (including graduate employees) is serendipitous, for us, as it allows us to connect our struggle to a concrete movement. It is becoming abundantly clear that the changes GESO has been promoting for about a decade now are not unreasonable.

What is it that GESO has been working to correct? Here are a few examples:

- OSU currently has no legally binding contract that guarantees that when an offer of employment is made to a graduate student to teach that the wages and benefits that go with that appointment must be honored. It is a common experience for graduate students at this university to be extended an offer of employment only to have it rescinded. Students who have chosen OSU for its academic programs, stellar faculty, and campus resources frequently find themselves regretting their decision to attend, given that they turned down offers from other universities that would have been more stable.

- OSU currently sets its minimum stipend level at $1000 per month. A non-profit organization in Columbus estimates that the required minimum monthly salary in order to avoid any form of public assistance is $1400, and this is likely to rise. Unionized campuses often have a minimum stipend that reflects the cost of living in the area in which the university is situated, and bargain for raises indexed to cost of living increases. For example, the University of Michigan’s minimum stipend is over $2000 per month. OSU’s minimum stipend level depresses wages and leads to countless sacrifices made by graduate employees every day. Even worse, Ohio State’s minimum stipend level seems to assume a number of stereotypes about graduate students: that they are single, wealthy, come to grad school with no previous debt, and are willing and able to go into debt to close the gap between stipend and living expenses.

- Departments are increasingly asking graduate employees to shoulder more and more of the financial burden in order to teach. The Music department has, in the past and perhaps currently, asked its graduate employees to pay for all photocopies related to teaching. Other departments will not purchase dry erase markers or chalk. The most alarming trend, however, is how many departments are now asking graduate students to teach multiple courses as a rule, rather than the exception, without adequate compensation. Philosophy and Political Science are two departments where students are increasingly asked to take on teaching two sections of a single course, or two different courses entirely, and paid at the 75% appointment level because the university prohibits 100% appointments. 50% plus 50% does not equal 75%; yet in many departments this seems to be rapidly becoming the norm. Gone unchallenged, this will soon become the expectation all around campus. The sad thing is, graduate students are so often desperate for the money and accept this arrangement without question; or when they are presented with the option, it is framed as a “learning opportunity” that will give them “an advantage on the academic market.”

- OSU has no independently mediated grievance procedure, leading to regular abuses of graduate employees and a culture of fear which prevents speaking up.

- Health care costs are unreasonable, especially for those on regular, expensive medications or those with spouses, partners, and/or dependents.

- and the list could go on.

We must be careful, though, and not focus too heavily on the wages and benefits issues. In fact, OSU has already used a common union busting tactic against GESO just when it seemed that we were gaining the momentum that would lead to unionization. In 2005, OSU caved on the health care subsidy and, in effect, gutted the momentum GESO had built. By focusing on the single issue of health care benefits, the university effectively stopped GESO in its tracks by giving a little, a 75% subsidy at the time; with our momentum killed, GESO has been struggling since then to continue to organize. This is hard to understand, though, given what we know about our working conditions, which are not good. We must find a way to fight back against the rhetoric of gratitude and sacrifice that is so normal: it is frighteningly common to hear “I’m just so grateful to have a position at all; I really need the teaching experience to be competitive on the job market, so I’ll make sacrifices now in order to make my entry into full-time, tenured employment easier.” But again, we know this is no longer the case.

The conditions at OSU are ripe for a collective response. And the GESO members think that response can be in the form of a union. However, with John Kasich in office, emboldened by like-minded governors in New Jersey – Chris Christie – and Wisconsin – Scott Walker, union rights to collective bargaining are under attack. But if we change the way we think about unionization from the mere economism of wages and benefits toward reimagining the collective politics of the precariat – students, flexible workers, academics, and others, then we have the opportunity to shift the balance of power.

Any unionization effort must also focus on the possibility for unionization to intervene in the governance processes at the university in a democratic way. I don’t mean, however, shared governance. Of course we should be involved in decision making processes – and I would especially like to see this happen through direct democracy rather than representation. What I mean, instead, is the possibility of an campus or academic union that takes the university as a site around which we build a ‘world’ or a form of life – in this sense, a union is actually what helps produce a particular sensibility at Ohio State.

This world of which I speak is one in which it is normal to expect agitation around wages and benefits issues, the university’s role in community development, and the way major donations are spent. It is a form of life that naturalizes a solidarity across employment category: janitor, Sodexo worker, graduate employee, and undergraduate work studies would just be the beginning.

This conversation is intended, as Amy noted in her introductory remarks, to begin to conceptualize, yet again, what unionization would mean for the university. What GESO has worked for, historically, has been a union for graduate employees. Over the past year and half to two years, though, we have been making connections to broader movements in Columbus – such as the Jobs With Justice effort to pressure OSU to sign a community benefits agreement that would include local hiring provisions and agreements to use union labor in new building projects. Recognizing that we must work not just in cooperation but in absolute synchronization with the efforts of USAS, SEIU, and Sodexo workers to unionize, with janitors, adjunct and full-time faculty, trade unions, and community organizations. What we have come to recognize is that the struggle of graduate employees is actually a small component integral to the role of a new paradigm of flexible, precarious, immaterial laborers.

 

academic labor and the new paradigm of class politics: toward an immaterial unionism – outline

A while back I posted a first rough draft of an essay I’m working on called “Academic Labor and the New Paradigm of Class Politics.” I’ve now expanded the title to include the subtitle “Toward an Immaterial Unionism,” and I’ve revised it to follow an Introduction – Theses – Proposal format a bit more conducive to the zine/polemic sensibility that I’m going for. I’m hoping to have a draft sufficiently completed to distribute on Monday, February 21, 2011 at the GESO panel discussion, “Emerging Trends in Higher Education: The Changing Face of Academia.”

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Introduction

A Brief History and Rationale for Unions

Thesis 1: The crisis of the university is experienced momentarily, but is in fact the condition of the university’s historical existence.

Thesis 2: The university functions in the economy today as the factory yesterday.

Thesis 3: Given the function of the edu-factory in siting and (re)producing immateriality, unions as a response to academic working conditions are insufficient.

Thesis 4: An academic union, as a manifestation of the common university, is a decisive intervention in the edu-factory.

Thesis 5: The university cannot be saved; it must be reconstituted.

Proposals

Kasich out to punish public sector unions in Ohio

Cross-posted from www.osugeso.wordpress.com

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An article in the Columbus Dispatch today painted a bleak picture for the future of public sector unions in Ohio. At the core of Kasich’s proposal is an assumption that public unions are obstinate in insisting that they be leveled “special privileges” due to their ability to disrupt everyday governance; due to this obstinacy, according to Kasich, public employees are making too much money, are exploiting taxpayers, and holding the towns and cities, and therefore the state, of Ohio hostage.

A professor at Rutgers University (NJ) was quoted:

“Jeffrey Keefe, associate professor of labor and employment relations at Rutgers University, recently completed a study of public-worker compensation in Ohio and found that hourly wages of state and local workers are 3.3 percent lower than those of comparable private-sector employees. // ’State and local government employees in Ohio are not overcompensated,” Keefe said. “If anything, they’re undercompensated, but basically what I see is that they’re equitably compensated’.”

What Kasich wants to do is eliminate the one primary tool public workers have in negotiating with their employers: their labor power. While most unions, and union members, don’t want to go on strike with any regularity – indeed, it is a tactic that is usually a last resort, following failed negotiations – the strike is integral to the very notion of unions. An employer has a set of powerful tools to exact what they want of an employee: the ability to hire and fire, the wage, the access to benefits, and others. Stripped of the ability to strike, public employees are left to rely upon the goodwill of their employer, which we know from history has never worked in favor of workers and their families.

The notion that an employer can punish a worker who goes on strike is clearly a violation of the spirit of the law, which allows for the formation of unions to protect workers’ interests and to use safe, non-violent tactics to protect their rights. The exceptions within the law – such as those states which outlaw certain types of public employees (police, fire, teachers usually) – from going on strike are meant to be exactly that, exceptions, not the rule. But Kasich has already demonstrated time and again that he has little real concern for the working people of Ohio, favoring his cronies on Wall Street. This effort to destroy public unions is first and foremost an attempt to erode the quality of life of most Ohioans, making his proposals for complete privatization seem like common sense. But privatization, the destruction of working class unions, and the elimination of taxes are not common sense solutions to objective problems; they are ideological choices made to favor the already wealthy and roll back years of gains for working people.

Fight Kasich, Defend Ohio.

 

ohio state graduate employees’ student organization blog

I’ve added a page to the OSU GESO website that redirects to a new GESO blog on wordpress. I figure it’s a good way to share our newsletter articles and lots of information, clippings, headlines, and stories from around the web that perhaps aren’t relevant enough to make it onto the main GESO website.

GESO website: www.osugeso.org

GESO blog: www.osugeso.wordpress.com

attack on public sector unions

Reposted from Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog.

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Richard Trumka is pleasingly direct about the actual class warfare going on:

November’s election has unleashed a coordinated effort to block the path to the middle class with an attack on workers’ rights.  When I say an attack on workers’ rights, I am not talking about demands for concessions in tough times by employers.  Wise or not, such demands are a normal part of collective bargaining.  I am talking about the campaigns in state after state, funded by shadowy committees created in the wake of Citizens United, aimed at depriving all workers—public and private sector—of the basic human right to form strong unions and bargain collectively to lift their lives.

This attack is fueled by the enthusiasm – and the financial support — of people like Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, and Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire publisher behind Fox News.  Both participate in a committee formed to raise business funds to attack public employees, based on the proposition that firefighters and nurses and medical orderlies are overpaid.

It’s a funny thing, when the firefighters arrived at the World Trade Center on September 11th and started that long climb up the stairs to rescue the bond traders trapped on the upper floors, it didn’t occur to any of them to call up and ask, “What’s it worth to you for us to come and get you?”  So how did we come to the point where our country’s ruling class thinks that firefighters…and teachers and nurses are the problem, and people like Lloyd Blankfein and Rupert Murdoch are the solution?

And in some state capitals we see not just an attack on the middle class, but an attack on economic rationality itself.  What else can explain governors like Mitch Daniels in Indiana and Scott Walker in Wisconsin rejecting high-speed rail through their states?  Turning their backs on jobs, turning their backs on their own state’s future.  Betting on misery and anger, rather than hope and progress – and common sense.

George Orwell once said it was fashionable among the really rich to bemoan the materialism of workers.  I can’t fathom what spiritual values drive billionaire Pete Peterson to make more millions by doing a leveraged buyout of Hilton Hotels and then trying to take health care away from the people who clean the rooms for $12 an hour.  But I know from my own experience in the coal mines that when Hilton workers stand up for their health care it’s not about money—it’s about their families’ lives—the difference between lives dogged by fear and lives of dignity and security.

And I don’t know what deep moral force drives Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase to fund attacks on firefighters’ pensions, but I know why firefighters and construction workers have always needed early retirement—because you can’t run into burning buildings in your sixties carrying a hundred pounds on your back.  Too old to work and too young to die has real meaning when you don’t have a Goldman Sachs partnership to live off.

If it is really true that we cannot afford to make the investments we need to sustain a middle class society, then we will end up a winner-take-all society, a faded casino that pays a big jackpot now and then, but is headed inexorably downhill.

For the privileged few on the winning end of America’s explosion of inequality, inaction may be a tolerable state of affairs.  But working people, our members and the vast majority of people here in America and all around the world who cannot live off their investments, face an intolerable future unless we act—a future of protracted unemployment, stagnant wages, an insecure old age, rising energy prices and environmental deterioration—a kind of 21st century peonage to the lords of finance and energy and global supply chains.

These developments are, of course, directly relevant to recent efforts by university faculty to organize, for example, in Wisconsin and elsewhere.  (Thanks to Alan White for the last two links.)

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The only thing I would add is that both Trumka and Leiter leave out graduate employee unions, like GESO, who are trying to do the same thing.

academic labor and the new paradigm of class politics

Feedback please! I’m working on this for 1) the GESO website and 2) for some circulation in discussions on academic labor.

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Why would graduate students need a union? is one of the most common questions GESO activists come across while organizing the campus. Answering this question, GESO activists usually focus on our ongoing struggle for transactional benefits such as an increased minimum stipend, better health benefits for students and their families, a formal grievance procedure, and other issues. Rarely, though, do we get an opportunity to discuss larger themes and trends in higher education and political economy. In an effort to make the GESO website as useful as possible, we’d like to take the opportunity to address one of the primary reasons that a graduate employee union (and unions for adjunct and full-time faculty as well) is absolutely necessary: the paradigmatic shift in the United States from an economy of material production to one of immaterial production.

Stated simply, unionism is no longer confined to the realm of the trades (carpenters, electricians, pipe-fitters, etc.) or manual labor (longshoremen, migrant farmworkers, etc.).

The early days of unionism saw the creation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the CIO, the IWW; later, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) were formed to bring unions to new areas of the labor force. Even teachers were unionized in many places by the early 1900s (National Education Association, 1918; American Federation of Teachers, ). The growth of unions in the 20th Century  can be largely attributed to the maturation of a capitalism based on the mass production of material goods. This form of mass production brought with it a rash of problems the likes of which had never really been seen before: children missing limbs from industrial loom accidents, the black lung deaths of coal miners in Appalachia, and so on. Recognizing that government intervention was unlikely, and unable to combat the supposedly free labor contract on an individual basis, workers in the early 20th Century banded together to demand rights including fair wages, retirement benefits, injury and accident compensation, child labor prohibitions, and many other things we take for granted today in any workplace. Individually, a worker could not demand sick leave from the employer who literally exercised a power over the worker that dictated whether he could eat that night, let alone feed a family. Collectively, though, thousands of workers could force an employer to meet these basic demands. The peak of the material labor pact came in the wake of the New Deal and World War II and lasted until about the 1970s.

Decades of reasonable profits and a stable middle class weren’t enough, though, and with the OPEC oil crisis, capital began to push back. Beginning in Chile in the 1970s, then in Britain and the U.S. in the 1980s, neoliberal capital began to take root: outsource material production to countries where labor was not demanding a living wage, insource the production of new knowledge and innovation that would drive an economy without labor (a capitalist’s wet dream!). While we cannot know if we are at the pinnacle of this wave of capitalism, we can certainly say that the U.S. national economy is largely destroyed in favor of a global economy, the regional iteration of which is focused on producing knowledge, affects, and financial instruments – essentially, our economy has shifted to producing immaterial goods.

The university is one of the primary engines in the new economy, and graduate students are essential to the functioning of the university. Graduate students (and other contingent academic labor) have replaced material laborers in function, if not necessarily in experience. [It would certainly be ridiculous to claim that the experience of a graduate student in the humanities is equivalent to the dangerous life of a coal miner in 1920 West Virginia.] What is clear is that the labor required to drive the new economy is not coming from the factories, it is coming from universities.

Most of you are probably thinking at this point, ok, but still, why do we need a union, grad school is only a few years long and then I’ll go on and be a professor (or perhaps for those of you in engineering or some such department, a job in the private sector). If this were 1975, we would say, no problem, tough it out. However, the academic landscape has shifted dramatically: in 1975 the ration of tenured to non-tenured faculty on campus was 75::25; today it is directly reversed, part-time and contingent faculty now make up 75% of the academic workforce, with tenured positions rapidly falling below 25%. The sad reality is, most of us will leave OSU with an advanced degree and then go on to a pastiche of part-time academic jobs with little security, no academic freedom, few benefits, and wages so low that we’ll look forward to a lifetime of debt repayments. A graduate employee union certainly does not guarantee a fix to all of these problems, but it forms a particularly important foundation for a new class politics that can help 1) to alleviate the financial burden on grad students to hopefully reduce debt loads and increase the array of post-graduation opportunities and 2) to build a university-wide coalition of labor activists to not only protect wages and benefits, but also to create a democratic workplace.

 

Ohio HB365

A little background info:

I am currently the president of the Graduate Employees Student Organization (GESO) at Ohio State University, an effort to unionize graduate employees. Our primary concerns are minimum stipend levels (currently $1000/month), health care costs (currently the university only covers 85% for one GA), establishing a formalized grievance procedure that the university must abide by (currently there are guidelines issued by the Graduate School but are not guaranteed nor do they provide for protections for students from vindictive faculty members after a grievance is filed), and a number of other transactional benefits.

For the past few years, GESO has been active in efforts, along with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT) as well as a number of adjunct faculty organizations, to introduce and pass legislation that would make it easier for graduate employees and adjunct faculty to form a collective bargaining unit. As the law is set right now, we can organize but our employers would have to voluntarily recognize us. As OSU president E. Gordon Gee has made clear, he would not let this happen. Hence the effort to fix the law.

Well, our first HB365 hurdle has been leaped! It passed the Ohio House Commerce and Labor Committee by a vote of 5-4 (along party lines, of course…). The local newspaper, The Columbus Dispatch, covered the passage, but did a pretty awful job in articulating the issue at hand.

Below is my letter to the editor, sent at 7:45pm (or so) on 5/26/2010. In the event that they do not publish it, or they chop it to pieces, I wanted to get the entire response out there.

First, a link to the article.

Now, my response:

To the editor:

Re: “Labor unions for part-time profs?” 5/26/10

Thank you for covering the House Commerce and Labor Committee’s vote on HB365, an opportunity to remove graduate employees and adjunct faculty from an exemption to Ohio’s Public Employees’ Collective Bargaining law. However, there are a number of additions to be made to your coverage that would help illuminate the subject for your readers.

Important to understand, first of all, is that HB365 does not guarantee anything for anyone. Its primary purpose is to ensure equality under the law. Currently, graduate employees and adjunct faculty are two classes of a very small group of people who are effectively barred from exercising their own right to democratically deciding to collectively bargain. While it is true that there is nothing actively preventing us from forming a union, the law, as it is currently written, allows our employers to voluntarily recognize the union as a collective bargaining unit – highly unlikely in the current context. HB365 would simply provide a fix that would ensure that if a majority of workers wish to unionize that their rights to collectively bargain would be guaranteed. This bill would not obligate any university to negotiate with a union unless a majority of workers requested to do so, which is far from a certainty at many universities.

In addition to clarifying what is actually at stake in HB365, the choice to highlight Rep. Wachtmann’s comments without any discussion of the evidence to support or refute his claim was irresponsible. Rep. Wachtmann’s continued insistence – throughout committee hearings and in the newspaper – that unionizing graduate employees and adjunct faculty will significantly drive up costs for undergraduate students is not substantiated by the record at any university with such unions or in much established research on the topic. In fact, for decades graduate employee and adjunct faculty wages have stagnated while tuition for undergraduates has skyrocketed. This is due to a number of factors (which I acknowledge are not all objectively negative), such as the growth in university administration positions and salaries, the explosion of student affairs positions on campuses, the emphasis on massive building projects including student centers and athletics facilities, and so on. What the unionization of graduate employees, adjunct faculty, and other campus wage-laborers does is forces universities to revisit their priorities to focus on the educational mission of the institution. It forces them to realize that the drastic rise in the costs of higher education in this country has come at the expense of educating students and in favor of glorifying the pet projects of university presidents and powerful alumnae.

Also missing in this article, and in discussions of union more generally in this country, is that what academic unions stand for is not just the transactional benefit increases, but the transformational aspects of a union: an injection of direct democracy into the workplace. Universities have a long tradition of shared governance, where faculty participate in the day-to-day management of the university. Due to a number of factors, but primarily due to a shift in the administration of higher education, faculty have been pushed out of day-to-day governance in part through the strategy of reducing the number of full-time faculty to be replaced by contingent ‘teachers,’ now thought to be merely purveyors of information rather than true educators. Academic unions, at their best, help re-democratize the university.

The reality of it is, universities work because we do. And they should pay us accordingly.

Sincerely,

joshua j. kurz
President, Graduate Employee Student Organization, Ohio State University

Graduate Teaching Associate, Ohio State University

Graduate Employee Unions

I am testifying at the Ohio Statehouse on Tuesday, January 12, in favor of House Bill 365. This bill will make it easier for graduate employees and adjunct faculty to unionize. As the law currently is written, both groups are considered special populations of workers and therefore exempt from current labor laws that mandate an employer recognize a union. Instead, even if we had 100% graduate employee approval of a union at Ohio State, for example, we would have to be voluntarily recognized by our employer in order to gain collective bargaining rights. Of course, President Gee is one of the most vocal anti-graduate union voices in higher education today, so voluntary recognition is not going to happen.

Below is a draft of the remarks I will give to the House Commerce and Labor Committee.

Proponent Testimony for HB 365

Before the House Commerce and Labor Committee

joshua j.  kurz

Graduate Teaching Associate and member of Graduate Employees’ Student Organization, The Ohio State University

I would like to begin by thanking Chairman Yuko, ranking minority member Uecker, and the remaining members of the committee for providing an opportunity to hear testimony on House Bill 365. My name is joshua kurz, and I am a Ph.D. student and Graduate Teaching Associate in the School of Educational Policy and Leadership at the Ohio State University. I have also been a graduate student and employee at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Currently, I am a member of the Graduate Employees’ Student Organization, or GESO, a volunteer-based group that is working to improve the quality of graduate employee working conditions at Ohio State.

An economist at Ohio University, Richard Vedder, recently wrote in the New York Times, “Since most of the financial benefits of college go to the student, he or she should pay a large portion of college costs.”[i] This has been the conventional wisdom in higher education since at least the Reagan administration, and in strictly economic terms, may in fact be true. However, there are myriad reasons we educate citizens in this country, and especially at the level of graduate education, the purposes of education are undermined by a narrow focus on economic calculations. As we are becoming painfully aware as a society, the challenges of a contemporary world have quickly outpaced our ability to meet those challenges in a humane, equitable, and mutually beneficial way. Graduate education is particularly well suited to play a role in meeting these challenges. Historically, this has been the case, but the economization of higher education has far reaching ill effects, not least of which is the paradoxical situation of both compressing and expanding the length of time to degree, which of course effects the quality of research. The economization of graduate programs compresses graduate education by forcing students to find employment to support themselves, in many cases such employment equates to a full-time job or more, as students are forced to supplement assistantship placements with multiple positions or even non-academic employment. This, in turn, extends the length of time to degree because less time can be spent reading, writing, presenting, debating, and thinking about complex issues. This compression and extension of graduate education leads to the production of work that is not suited to meeting the challenges we must face.

To return to Vedder’s comment, I think it is grossly misguided to judge higher education in general, and graduate education in particular, through an individualistic, short-term economic lens. Many of the problems of today have their genesis in issues that have been debated for millennia. While it is true that science, technology, and mathematics offer solutions to many of these problems, focusing only on these disciplines is akin to a bodybuilder who only exercises the upper body. Philosophy, the social sciences, music, literature, and so on offer as much or more than narrow scientism; indeed, the persistence of the role of religion in global conflict should provide all the necessary justification we need to recognize the importance of fully funding graduate programs in all disciplines as well as providing real opportunities for interdisciplinary work.

It is within this context that I sit before you today, encouraging you to pass House Bill 365. What follows is a more specific set of arguments directly related to the working conditions at universities in general and the experiences of graduate employees at Ohio State in particular.

Graduate employees, such as teaching assistants, graders, and research assistants at public universities are among those persons denied full collective bargaining rights in the state of Ohio. In a nutshell, HB 365 would allow Ohio graduate employees the opportunity to exercise their collective bargaining rights to the fullest extent.

In the past, graduate assistants were commonly viewed as academic “apprentices” rather than “employees.”  However, academic roles have changed significantly over the past few decades.  Currently, full-time, tenured faculty constitute only 27% of higher education teaching staff nationwide.[ii] At the Ohio State University, over HALF of all classes are taught by non-tenured and part-time faculty and graduate students.[iii] Graduate assistants are increasingly the instructors of record for their own courses, rather than grading or leading recitations for large lectures.  Many graduate assistants perform the same kind of teaching as full-time faculty, often spending more face-to-face time with undergraduate students, and yet are denied “employee” status for the purposes of collective bargaining.  This is grossly unfair and degrades the integrity of higher education in the state of Ohio at both graduate and undergraduate levels.

Graduate employees at OSU face a number of challenging working conditions.  For example:

According to a 2008 report commissioned by the Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies, in order to be economically self-sufficient – that is, the ability to live without public or private assistance – in Franklin County, a single adult must earn $1,471 per month, or $17,652 annually.[iv] According to OSU Human Resources, 56% of all Ohio State graduate assistants make less than $1500 monthly.[v] Because many, if not most, graduate employees are on 9-month, rather than 12-month, appointments, their yearly earnings would fall under $13,500.[vi] OSU mandates that all graduate assistants be paid at least $1,000 per month.  This leaves roughly 25% of all graduate teaching associates at Ohio State with pay so low that they qualify for food stamps, heat assistance and other social services.[vii] In the Big Ten, OSU lags significantly behind Michigan, Michigan State, Wisconsin-Madison, Illinois, and Iowa in terms of wages and benefits offered to its graduate assistants.  If it is our goal to attract the best and brightest minds to Ohio State’s many graduate programs, OSU must achieve parity with these institutions.

Most graduate assistants are appointed at the 50% level (also known as full-time equivalence or FTE).  This means that these GAs are expected to spend roughly 20 hours per week on their teaching or work duties (half of a 40 hour week) and the rest of their time on their studies.  While some graduate employees are appointed at higher levels – sometimes 60% or 75%, the university has a policy that graduate employees are not allowed to be appointed at the 100% level.  However, there is nothing stopping departments from asking GAs to take on additional work during a term.  Many departments, such as Philosophy, regularly ask students to teach double course loads and in exchange, offer them an increase to 75% pay, even though it is near impossible to fit all of the prep time, class time, grading, time spent answering emails and in office hours for two separate classes (usually totaling around 60 students) into the 30 hour week that is meant to correspond with the 75% pay level.  Essentially, departments frequently ask GAs to take on twice their normal workload for much less than twice their normal pay.  While this situation is considered “voluntary,” it is rare for GAs to refuse, either in fear of losing funding entirely or appearing ungrateful,[viii] or because they so badly need the extra money, no matter how little it is.  As it stands, there is little in place to protect graduate assistants from being sorely over-worked.

OSU does not require departments to provide teaching supplies for their graduate assistants, although some do anyway.  In the Music Department, graduate teaching assistants must pay for their own teaching supplies.  Unlike in many other departments, Music GAs are not permitted access to department equipment to print documents or make copies related to their teaching.  They pay for their own photocopies, purchase their own dry erase markers, pens, chalk, and other office supplies that the department provides free to full-time faculty.  Graduate employees in the Music Department receive among the lowest monthly stipends on campus.  Without the protection of a union, many of them fear they will lose their funding if they speak up too loudly about this problem.

Funded graduate students at OSU are required to sign an appointment document that includes some standard content but differs widely by department. None of these documents is legally binding. As such, graduate employees may have their positions changed on short notice or taken away with no advance warning and therefore no ability to locate another funding source.  There is no set deadline by which graduate assistant appointments must be made each year or each quarter, meaning that sometimes a graduate employee does not know if she or he has a job until mere days before a quarter begins.  Normal course preparation can take dozens of hours to prepare syllabi and lectures, and frequently require the reading of hundreds or thousands of pages in order to design a course. Even those graduate associates who are given syllabi already written must still spend hours preparing lectures, in-class materials, and other work. Because of this, in addition to inflicting anxiety on graduate students, this system has a negative impact on undergraduates as well.  In at least one department last year, graduate teaching appointments were still being adjusted a week into Spring Quarter, causing frustration and confusion to both graduate students and undergraduates alike.

OSU graduate assistants also have no access to a formal grievance procedure, no system to assure that they receive professional, written evaluations of their work, no guarantee of wage stability, and they face as much as $1,000 to $2,000 (a month’s pay or more for most) in fees and health insurance costs over the course of a calendar year, further compressing wages.

The only sure way in which we can negotiate meaningful and stable improvement in Ohio graduate employees’ wages and working conditions is through a legally binding contract.  These improvements would put OSU on par with counterpart institutions in the Big Ten and across the nation.

Over the past few months, we have heard some lawmakers express concern regarding the fiscal impact of this bill.  First, I would like to point out that this bill does not guarantee that adjunct faculty and graduate employees will form a union; rather, it simply provides the conditions for democratically deciding the issue.  Second, in terms of tuition, over the past few decades both undergraduate tuition and university administrator salaries have skyrocketed, while graduate assistant pay has remained relatively steady.  It is important to keep in mind that graduate assistants are not directly funded by undergraduate tuition dollars.  Furthermore, OSU has already raised tuition to the legal maximum for a number of years and will likely continue to raise tuition whether or not graduate employees are unionized.  OSU is a financially healthy institution with a large and complex budget.  We believe that were graduate employees to unionize at OSU, it would not necessarily cost the state more.  The university has the capacity to re-organize its budget to reflect the changing needs of its students and employees.  A fellow grad employee remarked recently, “Our situation frustrates me, because I see the opulence displayed in other areas of university life: senior administrators whose salaries exceed hundreds of thousands of dollars, free concerts and comedy shows for students, and t-shirt give-aways on the oval.  I know that there is enough money at our university to pay for the supplies that I need to teach my students effectively, but I have no meaningful and safe way to voice my complaint, and this serious problem is thus ignored by the administration.” Many other state universities, including Michigan, Michigan State, Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, Illinois-Chicago, Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Iowa, Oregon, Rutgers, Florida, Washington-Seattle and the New York and California state systems, have witnessed graduate employee unionization without significant financial incident.  There is no reason to think that this bill will adversely affect Ohio.  In fact, it could serve to improve the quality of higher education at OSU and across the state.  Don’t undergraduates and their families deserve a fairly-paid, well-treated teaching staff at all levels in exchange for their tuition dollars?

Finally, denial of collective bargaining rights to low-wage employees such as graduate assistants has already had a financial impact on Ohio’s communities.  Again, we estimate that nearly a quarter of all OSU graduate employees qualify for food stamps and other state and federal assistance programs.  Ohio State graduate assistants are using local food banks in increasing numbers.  The Ohio State University is artificially compressing wages and then asking our local and regional communities to subsidize the accumulation of capital at the university that is then redirected toward non-essential projects (a 109 MILLION dollar renovation of the library!?!), weak gestures aimed at student satisfaction (bringing in yet another comedian), and administrative salaries amongst the highest in the nation. In a state that claims to place great value on education, and that boasts one of the largest public universities in the world, this is unjustifiable.  This bill does not mandate graduate employee unions, but rather allows for greater opportunities for us, as graduate employees to work meaningfully with OSU to improve graduate assistants’ standard of living and the quality of higher education in Ohio.

We are faced with a choice. Either we continue to enable a management-centric approach to higher education where we continue to produce great metrics (ever-increasing ACT scores of incoming first-years and retention rates and graduation rates) in the face of a constantly degrading quality of life for faculty, adjuncts, graduate and undergraduate students; or, we push back and allow the very people being exploited in this system to redress grievances, collectively engage in their employment, and negotiate legally binding contracts. Indeed, the long-term health of Ohio depends on a robust system of public education, which needs a steady production of graduate students who can dedicate their time to research and teaching. A graduate union may not be the most ideal solution, but it is a significant step in the right direction.

I thank you for allowing me to speak today on behalf of this important legislation.  I welcome any questions you may have.

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[i] Haves vs. have-nots at public universities, found at: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/haves-vs-have-nots-at-public-universities/?th&emc=th (accessed 1/9/2010).

[ii] American Federation of Teachers (AFT) report on Academic Staffing Crisis, citing data pulled from the U.S. Department of Education, 2007 Fall Staffing Survey.  See  <http://www.aft.org/topics/academic-staffing/index.htm>

[iii] Ohio Board of Regents report, “Instruction by Faculty Type  at University System of Ohio Institutions: Fall 2003 to Fall 2007.”  See <http://regents.ohio.gov/perfrpt/statProfiles/statProfiles09.php>

[iv] “The Self-Sufficiency Standard for Ohio 2008” (July 2008), report prepared by Diana Pearce, PhD on behalf of the Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies.

[v] The Ohio State University, Office of Human Resources.

[vi] In order to be more precise in some of our assertions we would need more data from Ohio State. However, the administration consistently denies GESO information that it could use to make the bargaining process easier. If any legislation is passed, it should include provisions to compel Ohio’s universities to provide transparent data on issues such as percentages of graduate employees at different pay levels, releasing lists of current graduate employees and basic contact information.

[vii] According to statistics from the Ohio State University Office of Human Resources, nearly 25% of OSU graduate assistants make less than $1200/month.   The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) requires that qualifying individuals earn an income at 130% of the federal poverty guideline, or $1174 or less per month.

[viii] The peculiar relationship between advisers and advisees exacerbates this problem. When one person (an adviser) has such drastic control over an advisee’s academic future, it is hard for any student to stand up for themselves when they are being exploited for fear of unjust punishment. Not only do advisers direct thesis and dissertation projects, they also write recommendation letters, which are perhaps one of the strongest factors in academic job placement. In short, the lack of protections at an institutional level for graduate employees leave them open to what can turn into a highly volatile, unpredictable, and sometimes petty clash that has dramatic consequences for a student.