Faculty, adjunct instructors and graduate student assistants on college campuses across the nation are attempting to organize labor unions at an increasing rate, a trend likely to continue, according to some scholars.
Such movements are particularly strong among grad students, possibly because they tend to be more active in social movements, said Dr. Lois Weiner, a retired professor of education at New Jersey City University whose research has explored the global transformation of education and its effects on teachers, students and teachers unions.
“They were the first to start to organize against the degradation of teaching in the academy,” said Weiner, an independent researcher and consultant on teacher union transformation. “And that’s what we are seeing. The degrading of teachers’ work in the academy. That’s what all this organizing is about.”
Grad student unions at Columbia and Brown universities recently won formal recognition from administrations at those institutions, and Georgetown University is working with 1,100 grad student assistants who voted in November for union representation.
Meanwhile, organizing efforts by their peers at the University of Chicago and Yale University have run into snags or outright administrative opposition.
Grad student assistants “barely make enough money to live on,” said Dr. Paula B. Voos, a professor and director of undergraduate programs in labor studies and employment relations in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
“Although it is a part-time job while they’re in school,” she said, “they are not a wealthy group of people and they are doing a lot of teaching of undergraduates and in research labs.”
