Dan Fishback: A campaign to 'think about'.

It's been a long time since reading the news has made me smile. But the other day I read about how the unions at Temple University have won benefits for same-sex partners. TUGSA, the first graduate employee union in Pennsylvania, was a pivotal player in this fight. How lovely. Now wouldn't it be fantastic if the graduate union at Penn would do the same thing? Oh, but wait! Penn's graduate employees aren't unionized, are they? How silly. I've actually only spoken to one person who opposes GET-UP's unionization campaign -- an undergraduate -- and his rationale went something like, "I'm not paying thousands of dollars so that my TA's baby can eat." Mhm. The anti-union message coming from the administration is decidedly more diplomatic, and, while I'm not a huge fan of the anti-baby undergrad, at least his argument cut to the chase. Penn's anti-unionization effort -- its "Think About It" campaign -- consistently avoids the real issue, which is that graduate employees require the power of collective bargaining to defend themselves against economic exploitation. Go to Penn's official anti-union Web site, and check out this gem: "Strip away the legal arguments and political rhetoric and the unionization question really boils down to this: Applying for a doctoral or master's degree program simply isn't the same as applying for a job." -- Judy Rodin and Robert Barchi. So? This might seem sensible, but it's irrelevant. Whether or not a grad student's "application" process resembles applying for a job, her duties upon acceptance often concretely fit into an employer/employee relationship. In 2000, the National Labor Relations Board ruled in favor of NYU's graduate unionization, explicitly dismissing that university's claim that "benefits to the graduate students so outweigh the importance of their service to the university that they are not employees." To suggest otherwise is to ignore the fact that graduates, who depend on the University for their livelihood, have no organized way (short of begging) to protect their interests from the fiscal whims of the administration. University officials consistently ignore this, always pointing to another distraction. They argue that collective bargaining will deny individual departments and scholars their autonomy, forcing them to sacrifice independence to the union. They make it seem like the union, by negotiating a living wage, would somehow restrict academic freedom. Graduate unions tend to be extremely flexible, with the capacity to negotiate different deals for different departments, backed up by the power of the collective. Unionization does not necessarily mean uniformity. It just means a stronger hand in the bargaining process. It means power. Think about it. And yet, while the administration seems on the one hand so concerned about individuals losing their independence, they actually claim on the other hand that the proposed bargaining group improperly excludes people. (To recap, that's "Hey, this group is too inclusive -- it treats everyone the same!" and then, "Hey, this group is too exclusive -- it's leaving some of you out!" -- think about it.) The nature of the group -- the people who would be covered by collective bargaining -- is based largely on NYU's precedent-setting unionization victory. Their guidelines for entry have been reviewed by the NLRB and do indeed make sense. (For example, a history RA is eligible, but a physics RA, who usually researches for her own dissertation, qualifies as an independent contractor and is ineligible.) The administration's cries of irrationality do not withstand close analysis since they do not even address the clear arguments made for the specific contours of this bargaining unit. Think about it. At times, the University's distractions border on outright deception. It provides a chart that contrasts the average union stipend to the average non-union stipend -- according to the graph, unionization looks like a bad idea. The non-union schools seem to pay much more. But the University neglects to mention that those non-union schools include some of the wealthiest universities in the country and pay more anyway. If you graphed the pre-union stipends versus the post-union stipends on individual campuses, you'd find a dramatic increase. Think about it. In the end, the anti-baby undergrad is really quite on target. This is not about academic independence -- this is about money. The University doesn't want to spend any more money on its graduate employees, who, if they could quit their second and third jobs, would actually make a much greater contribution to the community. A University that spends $800,000 a year for a president so eminently... capable... should understand that you get what you pay for. Dan Fishback is a senior American Identities major from Olney, Md.

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