TF Unionization: Why it Won't Happen Here

New York University's decision this week to appeal a landmark ruling in favor of graduate student unionization means the National Labor Relations Board will soon set a country-wide standard for whether graduate students at private universities can collectively bargain.

The regional ruling, written by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board in New York, held that teaching assistants are entitled to the same collective bargaining rights as other university employees.

At Yale, where graduate students have for years been angling to unionize, even resorting to strikes, teaching assistants are ecstatic and the university is nervous.

But at Harvard, there has been little reaction--not even a hint of happiness from graduate students or a pinch of perturbation from administrators.

Harvard officials and prominent graduate student council leaders agree that Harvard teaching fellows won't unionize anytime soon.

And the reason is simple: TFs here get paid more, get better benefits, get more say in their teaching assignments and are better trained than their counterparts at other schools.

That's not the University speaking--it's grad students themselves.

"Most TFs that I have talked to do not feel that there is a need for us to unionize," says Ian A. Richmond, president of Harvard's Graduate Student Council (GSC). "Graduate students in [the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences] feel much more strongly about issues than about employment issues."

Richmond points to the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, a cluster of classrooms on the third floor of the Science Center.

There, newly minted teaching fellows are taught their craft, integrating the practical--how to quiet that yammering know-it-all gov jock--to the theoretical--minority students are sometimes shortchanged by traditional pedagogy.

For Richmond and other students, the Bok Center links the discipline of teaching to graduate education.

"It provides us with resources that we can use, if and when we don't know what to do in terms of our own teaching," Richmond says.

Though TFs and grad students admit they'd like to make more money, many say that they are paid enough.

Richmond says that most Harvard's TFs feel they are fairly compensated.

The entry-level salary for graduate student teachers, who usually begin to TF in their third year, hovers around $14,680, said Russell Berg, dean of GSAS admissions and financial aid.

Given that most of their tuition is paid for, the salary is enough for TFs to find good housing, put on some decent threads and even buy a beers at the Cellar on Thursday nights.

"Compared with TAs at other institutions, we're treated pretty well," Richmond says. "From what I've heard in talking to graduate students at other universities, Harvard TFs are near the top in pay, we have a decent health plan and most of us have our tuition waived as an element of our financial aid."

Harvard administrators, who don't often trumpet their excellent relations with the students under their care, speak confidently of how well graduate students are treated.

Not only do most grad students have their tuition waived for at least the first two years of their education, says Garth McCavana, the associate dean for student affairs at GSAS, but "the next two years, they get reduced tuition," he says. "And they are guaranteed teaching in the humanities and social sciences."

Medical benefits, according to McCavana, are "standard at Harvard." He says TFs are provided with Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance.

Margot Gill, who is the administrative dean for GSAS, concludes that the structural problems underlying teaching assistant complaints at other schools--low pay, inadequate teacher training and poor communication with university administrators--don't exist at Harvard.

She goes even further, saying Harvard's relationship with its TFs is so strong that these issues aren't even concerns for graduate students.

Students aren't as sanguine.

"Not that everything is perfect, but we have it far better than TA's at many other institutions," says Adam P. Fagen, former president of the GSC.

"There doesn't seem to be an employment issue that galvanizes graduate students here," he says. "In general, I would say the employment conditions of TF's here is pretty good- respectable pay and working conditions, generally reasonable workload and benefits provided."

This year, graduate students at a number of schools have made public strides toward unionizing. Universities have resisted--saying it'll force them to raise tuition for undergraduates.

Universities also claim that their graduate students are students, learning the art of teaching by helping professors.

NYU's graduate students persuaded a regional director for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)--the federal agency that mediates relations between workers and employers--to recognize their right to collectively bargain.

If the students proceed with their plan to hold union elections, they'll be the first to do so at a private institution.

This week, NYU appealed the regional decision.

"The precedent for 25 years has been that TAs are students, not employees. They are working toward fulfillment of degree [requirements]," says John Beckman, the university's director of public affairs.

NYU's decision to appeal has consequences for universities across the country. Usually, local NLRB decisions are bound to the region of the deciding board. But any ruling affirmed or overruled on appeal becomes a nationwide edict.

At Yale, administration officials and graduate students will be watching the case with interest.

Yale teaching assistants already have a shadow union, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO). With its unacknowledged status, it has had limited success petitioning Yale to meet its members' needs.

Last year, a Yale protest to a TA strike resulted in an NLRB decision not to allow Yale graduate students to bargain collectively.

But the NYU case is different, Yale graduate students say, because it rests not on recognizing a single action against an employer, but on the very principle of collective bargaining they wish to promote.

"We need a union for general representation, to negotiate pay levels and that sort of thing," said Rebecca Ruquist, the fourth-year Yale graduate student who chairs GESO. "All of us are working without contracts. Some students had their pay cut half way through the semester--that's inhumane," she said.

Ruquist says that third-year graduate students who serve as TAs in the humanities make between $10,000 and $12,000 a year--a full three thousand dollars less than the starting pay for Harvard's TFs.

"This is below what Yale calculates as the living wage," Ruquist says.

And while Harvard provides tuition leniency and generous medical benefits, Yale has yet to catch up, she said.

"Two years ago, we petitioned the university successfully for a health care plan," she says. "But it's only for single people, and it doesn't cover dental. Some grad students haven't been to the dentist in years because they can't afford it."

Yale, which keeps an extensive collection of documents related to TA unionization on the web site of their public affairs office, argues that to recognize grad students rights to collective bargaining would undermine the purpose of graduate education.

University President Richard Levin said in a statement that the university believes "that unionization is not in the best interest of graduate students at Yale."

It cites the NLRB's own 1972 edict, which held that students who assist a university in furthering its own goals were mere students under labor laws.

Teaching, Yale alleges, is a fundamental part of graduate students' training.

And unions, they say, are only for groups of fully-employed workers.

But that's exactly what some Yale grad students say they are.

"I teach French five days a week and do all the grading," Ruquist says. "I consider it full employment."

At Harvard, where TFing levels can be just as arduous, the perspective is different.

For former GSAS chair Richmond, unionizing is a "last resort."

"We in the GSC hope that, if any serious employment issues did arise, the graduate students and the administration would be able to work through them without unionizing," Richmond says.