Graduate Student or Graduate Worker
A conceptual gulf between the negotiating sides
Members of the Graduate Employees Organization at the University of Michigan (UM) are on strike. They have been for a while, and the sides do not appear close to a deal. Things are getting tense on the campus in Ann Arbor.
Today, UM’s Public Affairs division tweeted out this message: “@UMich is ready, willing and eager to bargain with GEO over a compensation plan, but it requires movement from both sides. Real bargaining requires real compromise.” The image below was included in the tweet.
Union members and their supporters howled in reply and re-tweet protest. The university’s hourly rate living wage calculation was based on full-time (40-hour), year-long employment. Union members mostly work on 20-hour academic-year contacts but live and pay rent full-time, year-round. Graduate assistantships must pay a higher hourly rate to make a living wage. For union members and their supporters, this UM message was a sign of the university’s bad-faith tactics and approach to bargaining.
The message came from UM’s PR wing. And rather than being a genuine overture to the union, it was likely intended to influence members of the media and other observers to make the university seem reasonable and open. As a higher education scholar, I read the UM post and the angry replies as evidence of a cavernous gap between the negotiating parties in their understanding of graduate assistants. Nearly two decades ago, Gary Rhoades and the late Robert A Rhoads analyzed the subjective understandings embedded in debates about graduate student unionization. Much of what they found is pertinent today.
Divergent understandings.
For UM, the people who work as graduate assistants are students. Students are essential members of the academic community but primarily as learners and trainees, not employees. Universities generally understand the payment made to graduate assistants (along with tuition remission and health insurance) as a maintenance stipend intended to make their graduate education possible, not compensation for labor. The university sees graduate assistants’ work - primary teaching and research - as part of their training. From inside this logic, the university is not the student’s employer, and the students are not employees. Graduate assistant supervisors are not bosses, they are mentors and advisors. The point of graduate school is not to work for an income but to prepare for a profession defined by the exercise of expert judgment. Experts are colleagues and should be trained and socialized collegially. Adversarial employment bargaining is not collegial. Thus, the concept of a living wage, introduced by the union, is outside the university’s framework. Bad faith or not, it is not surprising that the university didn’t manage the messaging about living wages well because it likely doesn’t understand how the living wage issue relates to graduate education.
Union members see themselves as graduate employees. Yes, they are learners and trainees, but their primary experience with the university is as academic workers whose labor advances the university’s educational and scholarly mission. As graduate employees see it, the university runs on their labor, and therefore they deserve fair compensation that will allow them to live with dignity. While graduate appointments typically come with a half-time (20 hours per week) contract, the teaching and research for which they are paid often consume more hours than that. Graduate employees are unpaid during the summer months, even though they often work all year to progress toward a degree and enter a career. They can compete for summer fellowships, which are difficult to win. Although wage labor in the service economy is an option for summer sustenance, that slows down academic progress and can feel degrading. Beyond the graduate assistantship, union members work on their own thesis and dissertation projects, perform service to their field of study, and support the university in numerous other ways. Operating from the labor theory of value, from their point of view, the university’s success depends on them. Work for pay is not the only way graduate assistants experience the university in a worker-employer relationship. Their supervisors, mostly professors, wield tremendous power over their daily lives and futures. Graduate assistant supervisors are graduate employees’ bosses. A negative appraisal could result in losing funding for the next year. And for the many graduate employees who work on temporary visas, adverse employment outcomes could result in deportation.
Three things help us understand these different views.
Race and class. For decades, graduate assistants were mostly white men bachelors in their 20s or early 30s from affluent families. How universities, including many senior faculty and administrators, think about graduate assistants reflects a default assumption that graduate assistants are young, unattached scholars whose spartan life requires little more than a maintenance allowance. And when the model graduate assistant needed any extra support, they were assumed to have family resources at their disposal. This model graduate assistant is no longer the modal graduate assistant. Today, graduate assistants are a heterogeneous group that includes people of color, older people, working-class people, immigrants, women, trans, and queer-identified people, and people with children and other care responsibilities. Even when universities understand the mismatch between the model graduate assistant and the modal graduate assistant, organizational structures and stances reflect the old model.
Massification and the uncertainty of academic careers. Academia provided a different, more secure opportunity structure when the structure for supporting graduate assistants was institutionalized in the 1960s and 70s. The range and intensity of work expected from graduate assistants were modest compared to today’s standards. A Ph.D. could be completed in a few years, typically no more than four or five, and graduate students would likely enter a reasonably well-paid tenure track appointment upon graduation. Today it can take six or more years to complete a doctorate and the prospect of a good permanent post after graduation is far from guaranteed. In the middle of the last century, there were relatively few graduate students overall, and they enjoyed jounior-colleage status with their faculty supervisors. Things are different now. The university is a bigger place and does many more things than before. The number of graduate students has increased, and graduate students are expected to support the organization, not just to train for their professional careers. Academic work is still a labor-intensive, skill-demanding professional craft, but it is now happening on an industrial scale. And with the industrial sale comes industrial relations.
Pandemic awaking. Like in many areas of work, values and expectations are different coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic. People, especially younger people, are no longer willing to accept the often crummy conditions, including being overworked and underpaid, that used to be accepted as part of the deal. Faculty members, including myself, reflect (often accurately) on how things were not much better when we went to graduate school. It is easy for those of us with tenured positions now to think back to our lean years marked by stress and uncertainty and conclude that because we went through it, it is not unreasonable to ask the current generation to endure the same. The question that graduate assistants incisively ask is this: Why is it okay for things to be bad now just because they were bad before?
Ok, enough.