Over one thousand Yale graduate and undergraduate students joined employees, union organizers, community activists, and local politicians at an Oct. 21 rally with one goal: to get Yale University to recognize a graduate student union. The Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) organized the event. The fundamental tension in the movement is evident in the group’s name—Yale’s graduate students seem to function both as students and employees, and members of GESO want to be recognized as both.
The rally garnered a large turnout: Mayor Toni Harp, ARC ’78, Governor Dannel Malloy, and other local officials made speeches to a spirited crowd. The group delivered a petition to Woodbridge Hall that consisted of over 2,000 signatures and photographs of Yale graduate students alongside community activists. In total, this petition was a 525-foot banner of pictures.
This isn’t a new story. Since 1990, GESO has staged rallies, calling on the University to negotiate with it. Each time, they are quietly denied. This year, GESO Chair Aaron Greenberg, GRD ’18, says things will go differently. “The consensus across campus can’t be understated,” he said. “We expect that Yale will sit down and negotiate.”
Yet the administration has no current plans to recognize GESO. University spokesman Tom Conroy said, “The University does not believe that it would be in the best interest of the University or its graduate students to have a union and change the students’ relationship with the faculty. Yale attracts the finest graduate students in the world due to the superb educational opportunities it offers and the extensive support it provides, support that very few schools can match.”
***
But what the graduate students want is specific and it extends beyond “opportunities” or “support.” Though GESO advocates seek increased diversity and gender equality in academia, more control over teaching conditions, and secure funding for student research, they really want a voice in negotiating the conditions of the environment in which they study and work. GESO argues that, as employees of Yale University, they deserve collective bargaining rights that would allow them to negotiate with their employers. Collective bargaining requires a union.
Despite the administration’s stance against them, GESO representatives remain optimistic because the national tide of student unionization has begun to turn. “We are organizing in a context where there have been a lot of victories,” Greenberg said, referring to the graduate student unions at New York University and the University of Connecticut, which both recently won recognition.
“NYU is especially significant, because it’s a private university which, through a series of negotiations, sat down [with its student employees] and is now making its first contract,” Greenberg said. “There is a consensus, not only on campus, but also in New Haven, in the state, that all of us want to negotiate.”
William Herbert is the Executive Director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, City University of New York. He said that unionization efforts in higher education have been increasing over the past few years in general, partly because of economic trends and partly because more students are teaching.
“There has been a general nationwide trend in higher education over the past four decades to have undergraduate classes taught by those who are not tenured faculty or on the tenure track,” he said. “In the many institutions that have followed this trend, the wages, benefits, and general working conditions for those who are not tenured or on the tenure track are inferior to the terms and conditions for faculty members who are.”
NYU made history as the first and only private university to recognize a student union. Their graduate students were originally recognized in 2000, when they won a case with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) which defined student employees as workers under the protection of national labor laws. This set off a wave of unionization in higher education as students were given the choice to vote for union representation. Brown University, however, halted that tide when they appealed the decision, leading to a reversal in 2004, as the NLRB overruled its own previous ruling. Universities now recognize student unions only voluntarily or, in the case of some public universities, according to state law.
Immediately following the ruling, NYU did not renew its contract. But in December 2013, NYU agreed to negotiate with its graduate students again. The trend of students unionizing extends beyond grad students: in April, Northwestern University scholarship football players won a case which recognized them as employees with the right to organize, a decision the NLRB is currently reviewing—though there is no set timetable for the decision to be reviewed. Depending on how the NLRB approaches the case, its ruling may change the legal playing field for student unionization.
***
At the crux of the unionization issue is what, exactly, these graduate students are—students, teachers, or employees. At Yale, most humanities and social science students are required to teach in their third and fourth years, while natural sciences students may begin teaching even earlier or over several years. Their duties vary from grading papers and tutoring for five hours a week to leading sections for 20 hours a week, and their yearly stipends range accordingly, from 28,400 dollars to 33,000 dollars.
Seven percent of undergraduate classes—mostly foreign language instruction and freshman English courses—have a graduate student as the primary classroom instructor. Allison Hadley, GRD ’18, a third year PhD candidate in the Italian department, teaches elementary Italian to undergraduates five days a week. “I am totally in charge of my classroom,” she said. “That feels very real as work. Teaching every day feels very real.”
In light of classroom responsibilities, should graduate students be treated as employees? According to Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Lynn Cooley, they should not: “Yale believes that graduate students are students, not employees.”
This definition of graduate students as employees aligns with the NLRB’s 2004 ruling: it judged that student roles, such as teaching undergraduate classes and conducting research, are primarily for the purpose of education and should be under the control of administration.
As students, Cooley pointed out they have access to traditional organizing bodies that field complaints and relay them to the administration—namely the Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) and the Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS). “The university provides our graduate students with levels of support—full tuition, stipends, and benefits—that are among the most generous in the country, and graduate students have a respected voice in university affairs that affect them through the excellent advocacy of the GSA and the GPSS.”
The GSA and GPSS are Yale’s most prominent student boards, which meet regularly with administration to address student interests. They are responsible for voicing student suggestions and concerns, but all changes in the University are ultimately up to administration.
A student union differs from a student government because of collective bargaining. While GSA and GPSS can only make suggestions, a union would be directly involved with the University’s decision-making process through the collective voice of its members. Employees would negotiate a binding contract with the employer, granting students more control over working conditions.
Not all students agree that unionization is the path to better working conditions. “I’m pro-union. I think unions provide a very important service,” said Steven Reilly GRD ’15. “But GESO disrupts a good relationship between students and administration for untested grouping. It seems that it actually fractures a lot more than it brings together.”
Cooley agreed that unions could be fractious, and possibly lead to divisiveness in student-teacher relationships. “We do not believe it is in the best interests of the students, the faculty, or the educational process to change the teacher-student relationship to a manager-employee relationship.”
Still, a study published by Cornell University refuted the claim that student-teacher relationships would be damaged by unionization. The survey found either no difference or, in some cases, better relations at unionized campuses, where students felt their duties were valued more as work.
Greenberg viewed it not as a fracturing but as a leveling of the playing field. “We want to be treated as equals,” Greenberg said. “We want to negotiate with administration, not our teachers. The union has not gotten in the way of [students] being able to do great work. It only gives them support.”
Frances Rosenbluth, professor of political science and director of graduate studies, agreed with GESO’s assessment that the formation of a union wouldn’t change relationships. “Unionization does not affect the student-teacher relationship at Yale at all. I do not even know who is in the union. The only thing we care about is that people are getting their work done, and mature students manage very well all sorts of commitments we don’t know about.”
Back at the rally, various groups had truly come together in the name of unity. Mayor Harp got behind the grad students’ cause, to loud cheers. “The issue that brings us together this afternoon, the issue that will keep us together is jobs and employment,” she said.“[Yale recognizing GESO] would simply strengthen one more strand in the network of good jobs we want for all people of New Haven, the good jobs working men and women need to support themselves and their families, the good jobs upon which a growing, sustainable economy depends.”
But the administration has yet to contact GESO because, fundamentally, there is disconnect between how graduate students see their work and how the University views it. Student teachers and researchers perform duties that might garner employee status in a different environment. But in the eyes of administrators, they’re still students.