Thousands of Graduate Assistants Join AFT

by Mike Hall, May 6, 2009

Strong-arm tactics by the Central Michigan University (CMU) administration—including a last-minute letter filled with anti-union rhetoric and innuendo—couldn’t sway graduate assistants from exercising their freedom to form a union and bargain for a better life.

On Monday and Tuesday, the CMU graduate assistants voted overwhelmingly to join the Graduate Student Union/AFT. The 450 teaching and administrative assistants teach, grade, tutor and perform administrative duties on the university’s Mt. Pleasant campus.

Also last week, graduate assistants at Florida State University (FSU) voted to join FSU Graduate Assistants United (FSU-GAU), a Florida Education Association/NEA/AFT affiliate. The new union will represent 2,800 graduate employees.

At Central Michigan, Barbara McKenna reports on AFT’s FACE Talk blog:

The strength of the vote was a repudiation of the strong-arm tactics of the administration, which raised the heat in the final days of the organizing drive by sending a letter urging the GAs to vote no on the question of union representation.

The letter from Roger Coles, interim dean of the College of Graduate Studies, not only urged graduate assistants to vote “No” but also alluded to union threats, intimidation and coercion that never happened in the campaign.

That letter caught the attention of the Michigan State AFL-CIO, which was holding its biannual meeting as the letters arrived in student mailboxes. AFT Michigan President David Hecker says that twice during the daylong meeting, delegates went their phones to protest the use of taxpayer money to fight the students’ desire to join a union.

That message, coming from a taxpayer-subsidized university that gets the rest of its money from tuition paid by working class families, is abhorrent.

Meanwhile the graduate assistants were hearing quite a different story from the state’s elected officials. Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) sent the students a letter urging them to decide for themselves, but to vote in the election.

Unions are an integral part of life in our nation, our state and on our university campuses….I know that many of the administrators who lead our universities value the role that labor unions play, particularly when it comes to winning public support for higher education. In my own experience, unions have been important and constructive members of the higher education family in our state.

In addition, several members of the state Senate and House higher education appropriations subcommittees wrote to the graduate assistants, describing how graduate assistant unions at several other state universities in Michigan have enhanced quality at those schools

by working to not only improve pay and working conditions, but by giving graduate assistants a collective voice at the university.

In her blog, McKenna writes:

In the end, however, it was how the grad assistants weighed in that counted. By voting for the union, they affirmed their right to negotiate health insurance, salary, tuition waivers, and other conditions of employment with the university administration. Overall, however, the central issue for the GSU was recognition.

“We need a union to advocate for our rights,” said Shelley Leininger, a GA in Clinical Psychology and a member of the union’s organizing committee. “A union will give us a voice at the university.”

At Florida State, FACE Talk’s Craig Smith reports the graduate assistants voted by a nearly 4-1 margin to join FSU-GAU. He says the key issues centered on increased workloads, substandard and inadequate pay, expensive health insurance that employees had to purchase and a lack of input on any of those working conditions.

Says FSU-GAU Co-President Danielle Holbrook:

We teach a majority of the classes at FSU. We are the largest group of employees on campus, but we have been working without job security or health insurance. Our workloads have been increasing while our salary remains the same, which means in this economy we’re being paid less each year.

Without our labor, the university could not function, but we’ve had no legal voice in how we are treated, so we organized a union and are ready to negotiate with the university.

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