Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chroni News Blog are reporting on a bill dropped by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Representative George Miller (D-CA) that would clarify the National Labor Relations Act so that graduate teaching and research assistants at private colleges and universities are included as employees under the Act.  This legislation is, of course, in response to the 2004 ruling by the anti-union, Bush-appointed National Labor Relations Board that determined graduate TA's and RA's were not employees. 

AFT and other unions have been working to reverse that decision ever since, because  . . . well, because the Board was wrong. 

More on that after the jump.

The Graduate Employees Organization/AFT at the University of Michigan pulled off a major coup last week, using a well-timed job action to convince administrators to reach a tentative agreement on a three-year contract. GEO members had voted overwhelmingly on March 22^nd to execute a two-day walkout March 25th and 26^th. This came five months into negotiations on a contract set to expire March 1, but that was extended twice.

On the morning of March 25th, graduate employees blocked the entrances to classroom buildings, and were first to arrive at two major construction sites, the Michigan Stadium and the Ross School of Business. Construction workers declining to cross the picket lines around these multi-million dollar projects quickly got management’s attention. So did shows of support for the GEO that came from faculty and students. UM went back to the table and before midnight, the two sides had come to an agreement.

At stake for the graduate student instructors (GSIs) were salary increases, health care and child care coverage. Seeking equity for all their members, the GEO membership emphasized the need to help one group in particular—those GSIs who worked the fewest hours and thus had the lowest income and fewest benefits to support them.

The final agreement featured:

• Salaries increases of 6.2 percent in the first year and 3.5 percent in the next two years. In the last year of the contract, the average GSI will make $17,395 for two semesters’ work.
• Increased mental health care coverage.
• Better health insurance coverage for all GSIs, even those working fewer than full-load hours.
• Full tuition waivers for all GSIs working 7.5 or more hours per week.
• More family-friendly policies, including increased childcare subsidies and six weeks of paid maternity leave.

For more about the settlement, go to http://www.umgeo.org/.

I know, wrong holiday. But I tell you listening to arguments about unions from the opposition makes me feel like Bill Murray.  It's the same story day after day--the same arguments, time after time.  The latest example comes in The Examiner's article on the efforts by Maryland graduate employees to organize and help pass enabling legislation that was recently introduced.

First you got the boss weighing in with the usual they aren't employees line:

University officials oppose the legislation, arguing that graduate teaching assistants are students, not employees.

“It’s an educational relationship with the university, not an economic relationship,” said Patrick J. Hogan, lobbyist for the University System of Maryland.

Right. So when the university has a graduate student cover a class, she isn't being paid for a service--i.e., an economic relationship--because she is "learning."  But if someone else, say a faculty member, covers the same class, he is being paid for a service--i.e., an economic relationship--and I guess if he learns something along the way, that is a bonus.  This is known in the technical argumentation world as the "having your cake and eating it too" maneuver.

If a graduate student doesn't cover a class, someone else will and every alternative is someone called "an employee"!  You cannot deny someone employee status because they are learning something.  People learn things while they work all the time and they become better at what they are doing--often that is a sign of a good employment situation.  But we are still providing a service and being remunerated for it because it is an employment situation. 

More to the point, as Laura Moore, president of the Graduate Student Government at the University of Maryland and Organizing Committee member of the Maryland Teachers and Researchers responds:

“If we stop working, we stop getting paid. That’s an employer-employee relationship.”

Perhaps that recognition is why there are over 40,000 graduate employees in this country in over a dozen states that have organized unions and been recognized.

More after the flip.

Phew! That must be what the 940 History PhD in the class of 2006-07 is saying now that they know that there are 1,030 job openings listed in the American Historical Association's magazine, Perspectives.  The Chroni's News Blog reports that:

newly minted Ph.D.’s [in history] are expected to be outnumbered — for the third year in a row — by the job openings in their discipline, according to a new report by Robert B. Townsend, the association’s assistant director for research and publications.

So much for all the hullabaloo about over-production of PhDs vs. the number of tenure-track lines out there.  I expect all 940 History PhDs to land good jobs this year!

Of course there is the small caveat that the 1,030 positions include "senior positions and one-year fellowships."  And, of course, as a recent Ivy league history PhD student (who is teaching in a nontenure-track position at a major university) suggested to me yesterday when I told her about the report (and she got done chortling), there is a longer term trend here. 

The past three years is only a snapshot of many more years of over-supply.  And, in fact, the report includes a pretty telling graph that makes this point (although there is little discussion of the longer term trend).  Here is the graph:

Okay, the numbers are small, I know.  But here is what you really need to know.  The red line represents new PhDs and the blue, job openings.  You can see that the people have clearly outpaced the jobs with a few exceptional years there in the late 1980s (when apparently there were thousands of leftover PhDs from the 70s to fill the gap).

Now one of the commenters over at the Chroni Blog happily suggested that the long term trend doesn't matter since a PhD has a "short shelf-life." So the idea of a glut of applicants doesn't hold because really "2007 Ph.D.s are competing only with their own peers and with the comparatively small number of 2005 and 2006 graduates who have managed to 'freeze' their credentials by obtaining fixed-term posts."  Well if that is the case, the situation is even more distressing.  That would mean that PhD students can spend 10 years getting a degree with only a 2- or 3-year window to land a job or basically pitch the idea of being a teacher and scholar in the filed she has devoted herself to.

Now perhaps I am just to pessimistic and I should just be happy about the AHA spin report.  But I can't help but think that feeling good about these numbers simply demonstrates the overall poor state of things.  Here is a number I would like to see--what percentage of History PhDs over the last 20 years are still working in their field and how many are working in contingent faculty positions.  That might give...

OK, so I was on the road working with activists on FACE when this self-obsessed faculty member's trashing of graduate students in the Chronicle was called to my attention by, oh, virtually every grad employee I know.  I kept creating a response in my head but feeling overwhelmed by the novel-length post it was going to take to both respect faculty work and at the same time take on the real problematic arguments put forth in this commentary piece--both in terms of substance and in terms of putting it out there this way in a major trade publication (although apparently the author isn't quite sure enough to use her real name). 

So bless New Kid on the Hallway who not only took on Lagretta Gradgrind once, but then carried it through another and another post.

That said, I would love to hear from some actual grad employees regarding Gradgrind's rant about how all of her "children" have failed her.

Since so many union staffers I know were somewhere in the process of graduate work when they made the jump to union work, I hate to provide any resources that would help graduate students complete their studies.  Of course, I am *cough* joking and thought I would share this site I recently ran into which is devoted to helping graduate students. 

PhinisheD is a "discussion and support group for people trying to finish their dissertations or theses, and those who have been there."  The site offers a variety of discussion boards ranging from "on-topic" discussions about working on the Dis to "off-topic" discussions about how to stay in shape and keep your sanity.  I suppose it says something about the state of support and mentoring for graduate employees that this site appears to be flourishing.  Thoughts? 

Sometimes, there is just too much too keep up with out there.  Last week, PZ Myers over Pharyngula started an excellent discussion about the number of graduate students in the biological sciences vs. the number of tenure-track faculty positions available (hint: there are more students, lots more students, than positions).  Okay it isn't quite that simple, but we often think of graduate student pipeline issues like this as limited to the humanities and social sciences, so the discussion is interesting particularly given the focus on the biological sciences.  So if, like me, you missed it, hop on over and check it out.

Recently a project by the Council of Graduate Schools that looks at the time to degree rates for PhD students got some attention in the trade press. Now I don’t want to discount the whole “how longs does it/should it take” question, but the point that caught my eye was at the very end of the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription).

The author of that article noted that:

[y]oung scholars who completed the survey also said they thought that teaching assistantships tended to increase the time it took to earn a degree. That concern ran especially high in math and physical sciences and in the humanities, the two broad fields where teaching assistantships outnumber research assistantships.

We at AFT call those young scholars “graduate employees” since, you know, they work for the university. And we know that their ranks are swelling as fast as other contingent faculty. In 1997, the Department of Ed reports that there were 218,014 graduate employees at our colleges and universities and by 2005 that number had increased by 45% to 315,664. Graduate employees have become a significant segment of the higher education instructional workforce and, much like contingent faculty, they are underpaid and under-supported.