Study Shows Grad Unions Improve Collegiality

by Toby Higbie

A study by Tufts University researcher Gordon Hewitt exposes several arguments used against graduate student unions as baseless. In particular, the study shows that unions do not disrupt the educational relationship between graduate students and their faculty mentors.

"These findings demonstrate that the relationship of faculty and graduate students is not negatively affected by collective bargaining," said Hewitt. "Administrators are using a specious argument when they invoke the disrupted educational relationship theory in defending their campus against an organizing effort."

In fact, Hewitt's survey found that graduate student unions tend to create a positive environment on campus. "The graduate student union [on] our campus has had a positive impact on the working and, in turn, studying and research lives of our grad students ... . For our department, the contracts negotiated to date have helped regularize hiring, working and disciplinary procedures in positive ways," said one surveyed faculty member.

Hewitt surveyed almost 300 faculty members in the liberal arts and sciences at universities with recognized graduate employee collective bargaining agents including the University of Massachusetts, SUNY Buffalo, the University of Florida, the University of Michigan and the University of Oregon.

The survey found that graduate employee unions did not disrupt the intellectual life of academic departments. Over 90 percent of faculty answered "no" to the question "does the graduate employee collective bargaining agreement inhibit your ability to advise or instruct your graduate students." Only 2 percent of the respondents thought collective bargaining created an "adversarial relationship" between mentors and graduate students.

Hewitt's survey supports the ample anecdotal evidence in favor of graduate unions. "Collective bargaining for graduate-student employees is a highly effective and beneficial means of conducting labor relations, and in my view it has in no way harmed collegiality or the teaching, research, and service missions of this university," wrote a department chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in an affidavit in support of the GEO's petition for a union election in 1996. According to the department chair, the better benefits won by the graduate union allowed the university to compete for the best graduate students.

Similarly, a University of Michigan department chair wrote to an administrator that the first graduate union contract "had an immediate positive effect in alleviating both actual economic problems andunpredictability of costs and income, and it greatly eased my job as an administrator of that program."

The survey and anecdotal evidence point to one conclusion: graduate unions deal with the real problems arising from the economic relationship between the university and its student employees. The unions give voice to graduate students' concerns, and the grievance procedures in their contracts help deal with cases of abuse. Graduate student unions don't get in the way of good relationships between faculty and students because that's not what their membership wants. It's that simple: we are the union, so the union does what we want.

This article was originally published in The Organizer, the newspaper of the GEO, in January 2000.