University of Maryland Graduate Student Employees Fighting for a Union

by Mike Hall, Feb 15, 2008

More than 40,000 college and university graduate student employees have joined unions in a dozen states. Now, graduate student employees at the University of Maryland are fighting to form a union and are working hard to win passage of a bill in the state Legislature granting them collective bargaining rights.

These are the folks who teach a lot of the undergraduate classes, grade the papers and do much of the same work as full-time teachers, all while they are taking their own graduate classes and writing dissertations and theses.

But officials on the College Park campus are aghast the graduate student employees might actually want a voice on the job. They are trotting out the same old tired arguments our friend Craig Smith at Free Exchange on Campus says makes him feel like Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day.”

Some of those arguments were trotted out in a recent [Washington, D.C.] Examiner article. Smith challenges them at FACE Talk—AFT’s higher education blog for adjunct, contingent faculty and graduate student employees.

It’s the same story day after day—the same arguments, time after time….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.

Smith forcefully deconstructs the Examiner’s arguments and then graduate employee Laura Moore boils it down this way:

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

Moore is president of the Graduate Student Government at the University of Maryland and Organizing Committee member of the Maryland Teachers and Researchers.

Click here to read Craig’s full post.  

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