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William
Vaughn 1. Given the state of American labor, organizing a union necessarily entails explaining—over and over again—just what a union is. Especially in the academy, this task never ends. Most new education workers require at least some education in labor, and each class of incoming graduate employees needs to be educated at the most basic of levels. Indeed, such education must happen at every level of a campaign and in every bargaining unit. To cite just one example, grad union activists must walk each generation of student newspaper reporters through the most elementary dimensions of a labor world view: for instance, why workers have rights at all and how they came to enjoy the few they possess. The sheer magnitude of ignorance across all populations is both astonishing and—strangely—hopeful. For if ignorance is one of the great barriers to organizing and maintaining unions of education workers, it is also a barrier that may be overcome through education. And when those providing such education are themselves teachers, the prospect of success becomes more encouraging yet. Because the inherent overlap between teaching and organizing is often overlooked, prospective academic activists need to be reminded of just how much they already know about moving people to action.1
2. In the case of the Graduate Employees’ Organization,
IFT-AFT/AFL-CIO, at the 3. The short answer is they needed to learn how
to be a union before they could function as one. In the two
years they grew from ten members to five hundred, this was the lesson
they practiced. Without that slow development, they might never have
succeeded in their card drive, won their election, endured a lengthy
legal war, and ultimately secured representation rights and begun
bargaining.3 What
the union learned in those two years was discipline and cohesiveness.
They learned how to work together, and that such collaboration requires
patience, listening, diligence, and tenacity. They learned how to
be a union, so that when the time came, an international would affiliate
with them, a bargaining unit would endorse them, and that unit would
cohere across the ongoing organizing drives, public demonstrations,
legal struggles, and job actions required to secure collective bargaining
rights. 4. Before all that became possible, though, the
GEO held its initial campus-wide meetings and, as a result of such
events, learned how to run meetings. They staged their first rallies,
and through these and other mechanisms, learned how to achieve a public
presence. They gathered issues and refined their message, thereby
learning to be a truly representative body. They encountered resistance,
and came to better appreciate the magnitude of the task that faced
them. They debated constitutional questions and experimented with
different schemes of organization, sometimes bogging down in needless
detail, but always learning how to shape the union to the goals its
members sought. They networked with other grad employee unions and
drew inspiration from a climate of activism stretching from New Haven
to Berkeley—centered, perhaps, on nearby Decatur, site of three of
the 1990s’ bitterest labor struggles.4
And throughout, they retained the professional
focus that inspired their origin. Although the GEO always campaigned
around specific issues, their emphases remained the right of and need
for representation: the recognition of academic work as work,
regardless of one’s job title, and the responsibility of academic
workers to fix a system that was failing them. 5. By the end of 1993, the early unionists at
the 6. The decision to formally become the GEO took
place at a meeting in the 7. But knowing they needed to accomplish such
goals was quite different from knowing how to do so. They would need
members to affiliate, because internationals were reluctant to endorse
a campaign with such limited demonstrable support. Affiliation was
also the key to funding; in the meantime, they had to make do with
what they could garner as a registered student organization—and securing
such status was another early step of the GEO. Publicizing the right
issues and staging successful events helped attract new members, but
prospective members also had to be polled for issues and recruited
to events. And somehow, all of these things had to happen as the organization
defined itself on the fly, reconstituting the GEO in fits and starts
as new voices entered the fray and new issues—external and internal—emerged.
No wonder, given these congeries of responsibilities both intersecting
and conflicting with one another, that it would take two years for
the GEO to first affiliate and then mount a card drive. 8. As the union grew to become a campus-wide movement,
it continued to derive energy from its origin in the English Department.
One month before the union’s first general meeting, the English Graduate
Student Association (EGSA), whose officers initiated the union effort,
sponsored a “forum on the financial crisis within the department and
the profession as a whole” (“English Graduate Students”). The meeting
was rife with the same angst that had colored department grad student
life throughout the 1990s—and stimulated the drive to unionize. The
department was struggling to meet teaching needs and support its Ph.D.s
while also reducing admissions to the grad program—this last as an
effort to address the job crisis by paring UIUC’s
share of “surplus” applicants to the profession. The discussion at
the forum ranged across a number of topics. Some participants argued
for a redefinition of the field that would acknowledge the public
and political dimensions of English studies. If, according to this
viewpoint, English truly were under attack—and the mood of the department’s
grads qualified as something like a siege mentality—then it needed
to learn to defend itself and articulate its concerns within a larger
debate about work, education, and the communities encompassed by these.
Others focused more locally on the department’s own solutions, objecting
to, among other things, the failure to adequately inform grads about
their meager job prospects; the ambiguity of departmental postdoctoral
positions; the unethical nature of using such positions to staff classes
that ought to be covered by tenure-line appointments; the inadequate
compensation for teaching assistants; and the overall indifference
of a faculty that directly benefited from the grad program—grads made
seminars possible and released faculty from lower-level teaching—but
did little to educate Ph.D. candidates about the nature of their profession. 9. If by the end of the decade the department
had progressed on some of these fronts, the larger issues continued
to bedevil them. On the one hand, employment issues of all kinds were
more openly discussed; postdoctoral appointments were more clearly
handled; and compensation for all non-tenure-line categories had improved
considerably. On the other, the department grew more and more dependent
on the adjunct labor it first expanded as a way both of compensating
for lower admissions and protecting recent Ph.D.s. At the January
1994 forum, one participant objected to the prospect of postdocs
teaching two hundred-level courses, but within a few years, such instructors
were routinely teaching at the three hundred-level, and on at least
one occasion, a postdoc taught a seminar
in pedagogy for new instructors of professional writing. To an extent,
these difficulties merely highlight the widely acknowledged truth
that English departments comprise the leading edge of cheap labor
trends in the academy. Like such departments elsewhere, UIUC’s
English program bears a massive teaching responsibility to the rest
of the campus in the form of composition and general education literature
courses. Staffing these courses means hiring large numbers of non-tenure-line
teachers, and no purely intradepartmental reform solves the basic
dilemma of this compromise. Either one lowers admissions to the grad
program and compensates for the consequent shortage of teachers by
extending the appointments of those already in the pipeline—i.e. postdocs
and other adjuncts—or one bases admissions on teaching needs and expels
teachers as soon as they have used up their “student” eligibility
(in most cases, after six or seven years). Absent departmental resolve
to simply refuse to go along with this regime—and such a proposal
was never publicly entertained in the decade of the 1990s—the alternatives
always involved actively harming some population, and the moral calculus
engendered by this arrangement led to Jesuitical arguments over who
deserved more charity—prospective grads or recent ABD/Ph.D.s—and exactly
how much charity was defensible in either instance 10. In terms of the union’s history, such relatively
local musings remain important because they speak to a fundamental
divide in how activists understood their purpose. Unionizing was always
both a gesture toward general professional reform and a mechanism
for local redress. The latter is easy to spot in the union’s early
public documents. The “Preamble” to the “Proposed Constitution of
the GEO,” for example, also drafted in January of 1994, recognized
the very local concerns of those for whom it intended to speak: There
are approximately 10,000 graduate students at the Similarly, a letter inviting grads to a February
28 meeting identified as union goals the following items: “better
health care,” “dental care,” “child care,” “increase in base salaries,”
“elimination of excessive workloads,” a “clearly defined grievance
procedure,” and “job security” (“Fellow Graduate Assistants”). Both
the letter and a flyer used to advertise the meeting connected achievement
of such benefits to the larger goal of unionizing. “TOO GOOD TO BE
TRUE?” asked the flyer, after listing some of the benefits mentioned
in the letter. Not for other state schools like WHAT DO THEY HAVE THAT WE DON’T? A Graduate Employees Here one begins to see the connection between local concerns and a larger,
national phenomenon. Since the benefits being sought were difficult
to disagree with, the burden entailed making them seem achievable.
In part this was accomplished by identifying other campuses where
such benefits had been won. And merely by mentioning the existence
of other unionized graduate employees, the GEO cultivated the impression
of a genuine movement. They were not asking grads at UIUC to be pioneers;
they were soliciting them to participate in a solution that had been
successfully employed elsewhere. (The other issue of achievability
involved cost, and here the letter was clear in expressing a pledge
that would continue in union propaganda for years to come—because
it speaks to a widespread fear among grads: “We will categorically
reject any offer from the University that will lower any graduate
assistant’s stipend” [“Fellow Graduate Assistants”].) 11. A letter distributed within the English Department,
also advertising the February meeting, more forcefully highlighted
the tension between immediate concerns and the larger forces that
produced them. Despite efforts by both the department and college
to address grad employment issues, “both while we are here and when
we enter the job market,” the letter argued, “we are still being forced
to solve these global issues locally, and with insufficient resources.”
12. Yet even the most immediate acts had their
impractical dimensions. Although that February 28 meeting—the GEO’s
first campus-wide event—came off smoothly, the union would struggle
for much of its history with the format of such gatherings. Planning
notes for the first meeting disclose some of what made these gatherings
so tricky. The meeting was to begin with some general background—on
the old GEO, the new GEO, and other union efforts across the country.
The next segment was devoted to small group discussions. The purpose
of this activity was to generate lists of concerns, which, after being
consolidated, could then be ranked by the entire group. In theory,
the exercise was intended to demonstrate the union’s responsiveness;
in practice—and in part because each of the small groups was facilitated
by someone who was “already hooked into GEO [preferably a committee
member]”7—it
served to recapitulate the union’s stated aims. No doubt this congruence
was meaningful—grad unions nationwide organize around similar issues,
and early GEO activists were aware of both what was frustrating peers
at 13. If the issue-generating exercise at that first
meeting proved superfluous, the general discussion that followed did
deepen the debate. Responding to a question about how much power a
grad union might have, several participants identified two key ways
the GEO could aid its members, even should the union fail to immediately
secure those benefits likely to cost the most money. They “argued
that organizing [might] enable [GEO] to get non-monetary goals accomplished
more quickly, especially grievance procedures.” Indeed, this willingness
to acknowledge the purely professional concerns of collective
bargaining marks the grad union movement as a whole—while opponents
are quick to assume unionizing is always about getting more money,
academic unions routinely understand their mission to reflect what
early GEO activists meant by “more public visibility and perhaps more
state recognition for the work we do.” Money is important, but so
is respect, and what UIUC unionists realized early on was that neither
their employer nor the public at large respected the work they did.
And if, in the interim, respect from the outside eluded the union,
they were always free to cultivate it among themselves. This was the
second means of nonmonetary aid: using the
GEO as a networking system or co-op for issues like childcare. While
it would be wrong to suggest the union has ever entirely succeeded
in such aims, it remains important to recognize this ambition in its
earliest instances. The GEO always retained a penchant for what one
might term practical idealism: solving real, definable problems—who can watch
my kid while I go to the library?—with somewhat wishful reforms: a
responsive, community-oriented assortment of my academic peers, that’s
who! 14. The February meeting was the first occasion
when the range of that peer group extended to grads from the hard
sciences and engineering. According to the minutes of the meeting, A
speech-comm [sic] graduate student asked the science students what
their complaints were. Several physics and chemistry students said
that health care was the most important issue to them, although they
realized they were treated well in other areas. A physics student
urged the GEO to focus on “safe” issues like health care and grievance
procedures, and to let graduate students enlist support for unionization
within their own departments.8 That support for the union would divide across disciplinary lines was
an unfortunate trend which lasted through the election and beyond.
“The high population of international students on this campus was
[also] a major concern—some participants thought that they would be
unsupportive because of fear of reprisal.”9
Furthermore, international students were
concentrated among the sciences and engineering, which only added
to the difficulty of organizing those sections of campus. The union
may have been encouraged by the convergence of their stated goals
and those expressed by attendees, but they were also getting their
first real taste of what it would mean to take their message out of
the humanities ghetto, where different indices of professional self-definition—am
I being paid to write my dissertation, or to cheaply replace a tenure-line
position? am I training for a lucrative private sector job, or for
the mere chance for an academic position?—as well as even more basic
factors such as citizenship status inflected one’s attitude toward
the hard work and lasting impact of unionization. 15. But at this point, with little sense of what
that work actually entailed, the union knew only that something had
to be done. “Things to Look Forward To,” the fourth point of the meeting’s
planning agenda, included a catchall of possible actions. To its credit,
even by its first general meeting, the union realized it “must leave
people with a sense that something more than just organizational meetings
[are] happening, i.e., we must leave them with a sense of something
to do.”10 The list of possibilities ranged from voting
for a student government party, Free Delivery, that would better advance
grad issues at that level, to turning out for a rally on behalf of
locked out workers at A.E. Staley in 16. In those early days, though, small things
counted for a lot. One founding member identifies among her earliest
memories of the campaign “having established something with the Y.
. . . [A] desk or something somewhat tangible representing what would
be the start of the union. So we had a sort of physical space established.”12
Initially, that space largely furnished
an opportunity simply for discussion. As one graduate employee from
History put it, “ [R]ight at the beginning
I’m not so sure we had a very clear idea of what we were doing. .
. . [F]or the most part, it was this small group of individuals who
came together and talked about what should be done, and what kind
of issue would be important, and what was going on in their departments. And I don’t recall doing a lot of things, actually.”
(That member dated his greater investment from two events: working on the union’s first brochure and speaking
out at a meeting against sexist remarks other members had been making.)
Other early activists concurred with the impression that little was
being accomplished. Another member, also from History, “remember[s]
there just being a lot of talking, and not a lot of really knowing
where to take it at first.” A colleague from elsewhere in the humanities
remembered being “tired of sitting in meetings for three hours, and
just talking about ideas.” She went on to say, It
can be exciting, but when you’re trying to do political work, you
really have to be focused on channeling your energies. So in that
sense . . . I sort of lacked patience with the personality struggles
that I saw early on . . . . I think it’s sort of the way grad unions
start out. But getting a more formalized structure—[a] clear sense
of what roles are within the union—helps new people come into the
union. 17. Another founding member, pointing to that
same moment, captures the effect of the original enthusiasm that animated
some activists. “I remember getting us space at the University YMCA,”
she said, where we were in the Student Activities Office
. . . and there was a group of us that just met weekly . . . and we
would just talk about what we needed to do:
we did petitions, we started a database,13
but for a long time, it was very much kind of ruled by the people
who want[ed] to do the work, and I was one of those people who was
willing to be there,14 and talk about it, and
think about things to do, so I don’t remember much of getting involved—I
just remember being involved, and not being able to get out. Indeed, it is often that inherently collaborative nature of union work
that both seduces activists and cements a campaign. Isolated as they
can be in discrete academic units, and focused as they are on individual
career paths which—in a climate that renders all achievement (conference
acceptance, publication, jobs) competitive—unions are often the one
opportunity graduate employees have to be professionally collaborative
and creatively disinterested. 18. In March 1994, the union proposed its first
set of bylaws. In addition to refining several of the issues introduced
by the draft constitution—the name of the organization, its objectives,
and definitions of membership—these bylaws also included guidelines
for the Steering Committee, which was the principal governing agency
of the union at that time. These rules covered such areas as format,
directions for minutes, attendance policies, and procedures for running
their meetings. While some of these last were innocuous—e.g. rules
for closing a discussion—others pointed toward the increasing internal
volatility of an organization driven by strong personalities and faced
with a monumental task. Point six of the Steering Committee Guidelines,
“Dealing with inter-personal antagonisms,” reminds the group that the goal of the GEO is to organize a union. Members
of the SC [i.e. Steering Committee] especially must be conscious of
how their comments and actions represent the GEO to the public, and
how their comments and actions effect [sic] the goals of the organization.
(“GEO By-laws,” 2). The document then lays out a procedure for resolving
“potential antagonisms on the SC,” saying first that these matters
be handled privately, with a formal response to follow if necessary,
at which stage no names were to be used. “Instead,” the bylaws state,
“discussion should focus on behavior, why it is offensive to people,
and how to be aware of and avoid such behavior” (“GEO By-laws,” 2). 19. Given the inevitable stresses entailed by
a purely voluntary effort engaged in what even then was a publicly
confrontational campaign, it should come as no surprise that some
of the early group’s conflicted energies expressed themselves in the
Steering Committee. Now almost a year old (in academic terms), but
still lacking a clear sense of direction, the union was struggling
to manage both internal and external dynamics— its members learning
together what it meant to plan, coordinate, and execute a massive
effort in organizing. While the most important aspects of that effort
are the external outcomes—affiliation, running a card drive, winning
an election, maintaining pressure and cohesion after that election—the
ability to achieve such outcomes depended upon sound internal mechanisms.
In March 1994, the GEO was still learning how to balance and synthesize
its internal workings. Any union created from scratch experiences
similar growing pains. And if the progress that spring was not as
dramatic as the union might have hoped, the group did continue to
grow, just as they continued to develop internally in ways that would
facilitate even greater external expansion. 20. The union staged no rallies in the spring
semester, but they did generate their first newsletter, and they did
hold another campus-wide meeting, both in May. The newsletter, a double-sided,
standard-sized sheet, advertised the meeting and repeated many of
the union’s basic claims. It identified the population of employees
it hoped to represent and described why they ought to think of themselves
as employees. It compared the wages and benefits of assistants
at GEO
is planning a campus-wide membership drive for the fall semester,
and our goal is to get 500 active members by December. With this membership
we can vote on affiliation with the union of our choice. Getting our
message out to all academic and administrative departments where Grad.
Employees work will be crucial to reaching our goal. Over the summer
we need volunteers to contact academic departments, to do research
on working conditions, prepare a mass mailing, and to help with planning.
Any amount of time you can contribute will help the cause of Graduate
Employees, and we’re darn nice people, too. (“GEO News-Bulletin,”
2) 21. This newsletter was the first widely distributed
document produced by the union. The February meeting had drawn beyond
the original humanities base of the movement, but as they prepared
for a goal of five hundred members by the end of the year, the GEO
reached out to all corners of the campus:
Statistics, Math, Psychology, Social Work, Urban Planning,
Business Administration, Agricultural Education, Landscape Architecture,
Agricultural Economics, Animal Sciences, Metallurgy and Mining, and
others. In most cases, early organizers were visiting the buildings
that housed these programs’ administrative offices and either stuffing
grad mailboxes themselves, or, when these boxes weren’t accessible,
leaving copies to be distributed. On a more limited basis, departments
with active members were being informally organized through direct,
face-to-face contact, but the kind of systematic, comprehensive, and
recursive approach the union would utilize in the card drive and after
was both conceptually and practically beyond them at this point. 22. Inevitably, the union learned through two
methods: trial and error and advice from other unions.
If the latter was proven and more pointed, the former was nonetheless
essential for what it taught early activists about the specifics of
their environment—basic facts, plus resources and impediments. These
are lessons best learned on the ground, and if the local knowledge
is more labor-intensive than the folk wisdom of organizing in general,
it also constitutes the field and test of that wisdom: the
immediate context that determines how and when and where and why the
general principles are applied. 23. The campus-wide meeting on May 4 was the culmination
of two semesters’ work. It began with some brief background, followed
by three issue presentations—on health care, working conditions, and
workload. Each issue segment was subdivided into a testimonial by
a grad employee who had suffered under the current arrangement; a
presentation that explained how a union-negotiated contract would
improve conditions; and a question-and-answer follow up. The meeting
concluded with explanations of two timetables, one long-term and one
for over the summer. The first laid out some principles of organizing
and described the population to be organized, then identified the
goals of five hundred members by the end of the year, an affiliation
decision, and a card drive commencing in the fall of 1995. The second
described more immediate concerns:
signing up as a new member if you weren’t already one, helping
to create an accurate database of members, raising money, writing
letters, volunteering in other ways, and meeting with the administration
to discuss the union’s concerns. The GEO proved that night it could
articulate its goals and plot a course for achieving them. The next
three years would tell whether they were right about either. 24. In the fall of 1994, the GEO’s
Organizing Committee consisted of twelve members. Whereas a year previous,
the entire organization totaled twelve individuals, all from English,
this dozen activists, merely one—albeit central—unit of the union,
included representatives from History; the Ecology, Ethology,
and Evolution (EEE) program; Materials Science and Engineering; the
Institute for Labor and Industrial Relations (ILIR); and Plant Pathology—as
well as English. The composition of this group offers some insights
into the possible sources of academic activism. English, the best-represented
program, with five members, is an obvious wellspring, as the largest
abuser of cheap teaching labor. History, which along with ILIR contributed
a pair of members, is a likely suspect for two reasons: though not
as large an abuser as English, it does employ a relatively high number
of graduate assistants; and some of these grads are likely to study
labor history. ILIR, too, is an obvious breeding ground for activism;
and while the program at 25. For the first time that fall, the campaign
was carried across campus. The breakthrough came when early activists
attended a meeting of the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU)
held at Yale “and came back with a real clear idea of what organizing
was, and what they needed to do.” As an early member from English
put it, “I was like, ‘My God, this is a movement! This isn’t just
us—this is really cool.’ And other people are on fire, and great things
are happening...So things just all sort of came together at a point;
that was really a turning point.” The union had also generated its
first tri-fold brochure (fondly known as the blue brochure), a document
that largely reproduced information from previous propaganda pieces—the
May 1994 newsletter; general meeting solicitations—but added, on one
of its folds, a cutout membership card and a form that could be mailed
to the union’s office, indicating one of the following levels of support: ____ I
want to be a GEO member ____ Send
me more information ____ I want
to get involved in Organizing and Decision Making (“Graduate Employees’ Organization. Advancing”) In some cases, the union was able to use campus mail to distribute such
forms, wrapping the brochure in an addressed invitation to a general
meeting.15 But
at this stage of the effort, the most common means of delivering entailed
walking around campus and personally depositing material. To facilitate
the process, lists of departmental offices were devised. Union members
educated themselves about the full range of graduate programs offered
by UIUC—their names, and where they were housed, and whether or not
their mailboxes could be accessed. They approached secretaries about
acquiring department directories and learned which bulletin boards
were most likely to be read by graduate students. They researched
area organizations that might have grad student members, and leafleted
businesses frequented by grads. They attended meetings of various
grad associations—equivalents of the EGSA from which the union had
sprung—and made their pitch. In some cases, they scheduled their own
meetings in departments, arranging for a room, advertising the meeting,
and seeding department mailboxes beforehand with the blue brochure. 26. These efforts met
with varying degrees of success. In November, a regular meeting of
the grad student association in Anthropology, at which GEO’s presence had been advertised, drew twelve attendees,
several of whom joined the union immediately afterward. That same
month, distinct GEO-sponsored meetings in Sociology, Community Health,
the Veterinary School, Linguistics, Statistics, and Agronomy, attracted,
respectively, four, two, two, zero, zero, and zero individuals.16
When people did attend, they often asked questions for which the union
lacked answers, such as What was the status of labor law in the state?
or Why didn’t the union stake out more specific positions on the issues?17
Eventually, the union would come to learn more than it ever wanted
to know about 27. Indeed, the administration was already beginning
to respond. That fall witnessed the first serious engagement between
the GEO and university higher-ups: a
conference between union representatives and an associate dean of
the 28. As a result of such campaigning, as well as
through more informal efforts like the weekly happy hours the union
was now holding, the GEO reached its goal of five hundred members
by the end of 1994. This had been the benchmark set by the internationals
with whom GEO had been consulting, the achievement of which would
signal to potential partners that the grad unionists were strong and
successful enough to merit their support. Throughout 1994, a committee
of the GEO had been researching potential affiliates. Across the nation,
grad unions were partnered with an assortment of internationals. The
three oldest such bodies, at Wisconsin, Michigan, and Oregon, were
affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), as were
the locals at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the grads
organizing at Kansas in the spring of 1995. The union at the State
University of New York was affiliated with the Communication Workers
of America (CWA), while nascent unions at Berkeley, Yale, and 29. The union prepared a forty-five-question survey
for AFSCME and AFT. The questions covered four areas: general matters
regarding how each union would fit the project of a grad employee
campaign; expectations for each partner to affiliation; specific campaign
plans and resources; and details about contract negotiations, dues
structures, and other financial concerns. The GEO wanted to know about
each union’s mission statement, and how those statements compared
to the GEO’s needs and goals. They wanted
the affiliates to identify specific challenges the 30. On 31. Affiliating was perhaps the main accomplishment
of the spring, but it was not the only one. In February, the union
held a rally to call attention to the
lack of adequate healthcare benefits for graduate students. The GEO marched to Chancellor [Michael] Aiken’s
office, and delivered letters asking for better healthcare benefits.
(“The GEO News-Bulletin,” Spring 1995) It “developed an organizing committee of 45 members” and “added . .
. over 150 new members” (“The GEO News-Bulletin,” Spring 1995). It
drafted an issues survey, to further determine if it was focusing
on the right concerns. And it continued to refine and modify its proposed
constitution. The 32. Needless to say, consent across campus was
far from universal. One encountered resistance in organizing, and
opponents were beginning to publicize their opinions in print and
in electronic exchanges. A typical such instance was an essay by Vivek
Rao, a Physics grad student, which appeared
in the conservative student newspaper, The Observer. Entitled
“A bad idea whose time has come?” Rao’s
piece combines the characteristic antiunion arguments. Acknowledging
that “[a] graduate student union may or may not deliver on” promises
to improve wages and benefits, Rao claims
that a union “will certainly infringe on the freedoms of graduate
students.” Confusingly, Rao then proceeds to suggest “[s]tudents
would only be able to accept teaching and research appointments if
the union ratified a contract,” and erroneously, the author reports
that “[t]hey would be forced to join the union, and pay dues
of 0.9% of their salaries.” All graduate employees would indeed have
to pay what is known as their “fair share,” or an amount equal to
the benefits they received, but they would not be made to join. And
while the figure Rao cites was close to
the average dues rate for grad union members nationwide, the author
neglects to point out both that unions typically negotiate contracts
that include a wage increase at least equal to the cost of dues, and
that the GEO, from its earliest days, always pledged not to sign a
contract that reduced anyone’s compensation. 33. Elsewhere in the piece, Rao
raises the usual concerns about dues money being sent to the international
affiliate, the (left-) politicized nature of such affiliates, and
the prospect of a strike. But the main current of the essay is “the
fundamental American principle of respect for individual rights. The
right to work,” Rao argues, is
as important as the right to worship or to speak.
If an employer and an employee reach an agreement, no one else
should have the right to interfere. If someone wants a better package,
he is free to work somewhere else . . . . Perhaps it is not too surprising
that unions are making a last stand in education—schools and universities
teach that big government and union privileges are the solution to
the social problems created by greedy corporations. This contempt
for the individual comes naturally to people who think only in terms
of group rights. Union advocates at the The GEO would encounter versions of this reasoning throughout its campaign.
The idea that employees were already somehow able to “reach an agreement”
with UIUC without a union; that a union is a kind of third party to
that relationship; that all jobs essentially operate on a love-it-or-leave-it
basis; that unions are uniquely responsible for politicizing the workplace;
and that abject employment status equals “freedom”—these were the
common attitudes of those most vehemently opposed to unionizing grad
employees. (Interestingly, Rao’s entire argument depends on grad assistants being acknowledged
as employees, and yet this was the main premise disputed by
the university’s administration in combating the campaign—Rao
wasn’t even aware grad assistants needed a union just to count as
employees at all.) There is no argument against prejudice—the union
simply had to hope that there weren’t enough Raos
to derail their effort. 34. But if the local resistance was beginning
to emerge, the GEO could always balance that against the national
tide of organizing. 1995 saw not only a board-certified election victory
in Kansas—bringing to eleven the number of legally recognized grad
locals—but strikes at Yale and two of the University of California
campuses. Organizers for the various grad unions—recognized and emerging—were
meeting regularly, through both CGEU and the AFT-sponsored council,
the Alliance of Grad Employee Locals (AGEL). In addition, GEO members
continued to be involved in the labor struggles taking place in nearby
The
last five years have seen the establishment of recognized graduate
employee unions at a rate of one per year. This past year has shown
unprecedented activity in graduate employee unionization. This movement
will continue to grow in strength and numbers as graduate employees
on more and more campuses turn to unionization to win the workplace
democracy and improved working conditions that established graduate
employee unions are already winning. (McCrossin,
6) 35. In the summer of 1995, no one would have known
just how much longer it would take to win such benefits at UIUC, though
members commonly assumed that their fight would be a sustained one.
For that reason, they also didn’t assume they would necessarily still
be working and studying at the school when that victory occurred.
Perhaps the willingness to commit to a cause from which they almost
certainly wouldn’t profit in any material sense constitutes the final
and most valuable lesson GEO members learned from their early efforts.
Education work and organized labor—often framed as incompatible by
commentators such as Rao—share a common
faith in the future. We teach to help prepare students for their futures;
we organize in order to protect the very possibilities—the sites,
the circumstances, the conditions—of teaching and learning. Learning
to be labor can indeed often feel like learning to belabor.
We often find ourselves worrying about or working at the seemingly
less crucial aspects of organizing: fussing about method; fiddling
with that database; asking forty-five questions when twenty—ten?—might
have sufficed. But in building the commitment to one another that
only comes from the shared experience of learning—making mistakes,
struggling, gradually improving—together, unionists can ensure that
concerns about the future will always inform contemporary practice.
That at least is how one group of academics learned to be labor.
1 On this
point, see Vaughn, “Need a Break,” pp. 281-282.
2 Current union practice appears to favor this form for the acronym, but especially in the early years of the campaign, members alternated between “GEO” and “G.E.O.” I preserve the second form here in those instances where a period document so has it; otherwise, I observe the current practice.
3 As I
write this, the GEO is in the process of ratifying their initial
contract.
4 That
decade witnessed three epic labor struggles at Bridgestone/Firestone,
Caterpillar, and A. E. Staley. For more on these events, see 5
The first incarnation of the GEO was active from the late 1980s
to 1991. In 1988, it worked to oppose legislation that would have
made tuition and fee waivers taxable. In the spring of 1989, they
collected over one thousand signatures on a petition advocating
a living wage and better health care. In the spring of 1990, members
sponsored a Health Care Forum, and that fall, they helped to establish
a policy that deferred fee payments until after graduate employees
received their first paycheck of the semester. In 1991, they worked
to secure compensation for teaching assistants undergoing orientation
training. According to the “Student Organization Resource Fee Board—Application
for Funding,” the organization’s goals were [t]o
advocate on behalf of the interests of graduate employees regarding
university, state and federal policies affecting their interests.
GEO publishes a newsletter, meets with administrators and other
officials, and gathers data to directly improve conditions for graduate
employees. What this
organization failed to do, though, was organize as a union—a lesson
its successor took to heart. Even though barely two years had passed
from the demise of the original GEO till the onset of the current
GEO’s campaign, the alienated and transient
culture of graduate life meant that the first GEO had largely faded
from memory. Indeed, attempts to organize graduate employees date
back at least as far as the early 1970s. Recognizing the fragility
of such efforts ought to remind prospective unionists of the need
to work quickly to build enduring structures—of the kind that affiliating,
funding, and constant organizing can facilitate.
7
12 All
unattributed quotes are taken from a series of interviews
I conducted with nineteen GEO activists between
13 On this
point, another early member—and subsequent union copresident—
remembered that
stupid little Mac [in the GEO’s first office] and what a pain that was to go through
that. And calling people
on the phone, and trying to put lists together, and looking at the
work log, and feeling compelled to have something that [he] could
write down in the work log that would be impressive!
14 Another
early member, recalling this phenomenon, remarked how she “was really
struck by how the union was run by strong personalities, and . .
. there was sort of this in group, or cliquishness, to the union.
And I think that was really to our detriment.”
15 The
GEO routinely encountered difficulties utilizing campus mail. Sometimes
the problem was simply not having accurate mailing lists; other
times they ran afoul of certain restrictions concerning mass mailings.
looked
like he was being obstructionist and unhelpful, but in retrospect,
he might have been doing a useful thing. . . . [I]n some respects,
I’ve taken up [that person’s] mantle. . . . I remember not liking
the authority structure that was set up. . . . [I] agreed to be nominated
to run for the presidency. And my campaign speech essentially amounted
to a denunciation of the structure of the GEO. “[W]e tried
to come up with a constitution,” remembered another early activist, . . . [a]nd so many bizarre personality clashes were going on that had nothing to do with rational politics. . . . [W]e were fucking clueless is what was going on! People [were] saying, “Oh, you’re antidemocratic.” We’re not antidemocractic—we’re just confused!
Works
Cited
“English
Graduate Students.” Advertisement. “Fellow Graduate Assistants.” Advertisement. Franklin, Stephen. Three Strikes: Labor’s Heartland Losses and What
They Mean for Working Americans. “GEO By-laws.” “GEO Membership Meeting Agenda.” “GEO News-Bulletin.” May
1994. “The GEO News-Bulletin.” Spring 1995. “GEO
Organizing Committee.” “GEO: Proposed Constitution.”
“Graduate Employees’ Bill of Rights.” Advertisement. Undated. “Graduate Employees’ Organization. Advancing the rights of graduate “GRADUATE STUDENTS!” Advertisement. Undated. McCrossin, Trip. “Grad Students: Tired of Being Cheap Labor.” “Proposed Constitution of the GEO.” Rao, Vivek. “A bad idea whose time has come?” The Observer “Student Organization Resource Fee Board—Application
for Funding.” Vaughn, William. “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been an Employee? Contesting Graduate Labor in the
Academy.” Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The _______________. “Need a Break from Your Dissertation?—Organize a |
|
A founding member of two academic
unions, William Vaughn directs the program in first-year
composition at
Missouri
Gothic Studies, The Centennial Review, Academe, and other
journals, as well as in several
anthologies of academic labor studies.
