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    Unionizing all HE labor

    This article in Dissent is a good call for action, focusing on the University of Illinois-Chicago strike last week.

    However, one additional factor needs to be put into the equation: undergraduate student-workers, who do lots and lots of service and clerical work: checking books out of the library, answering phones in department offices, and on and on. Marc Bousquet estimates in How the University Works that UG student-workers are the largest labor component, by number, at some big public schools.

    Should they be part of the bargaining unit, or should the bargaining unit negotiate their work conditions and limits to the number of them employed relative to full-time clerical workers, is a good question, but one or the other is needed I think.

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    4 responses to “Unionizing all HE labor”

    1. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      I think your instinct is right insofar as failure to limit the exploitation of student-workers undermines a lot of other bargaining processes.
      As to the question of whether to negotiate their working conditions or include them, the thing that leaps to mind is the way that a lot of faculty contracts specify rules for adjuncts primarily in order to protect FT faculty. It would be good if whatever was done with regard to student workers didn’t amount to letting other more senior employees dictate the terms of student workers’ employment in a similarly problematic way. That said, it’s not clear to me that including such workers in a bargaining unit would necessarily be a way to avoid this (again, considering how things have gone in adjunct-land for an analogy).
      Others more savvy about union-related issues than I might have a much better read on this, however, and I look forward to hearing what they say.

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    2. Union boy Avatar
      Union boy

      Part of the concern is that sometimes student workers are being hired instead of permanent staff. There is something perverse about this. There are some jobs on campus that are suitable for student workers, but a university or college seems to have a prima facie obligation to the greater community, which includes hiring staff from the community in jobs with fair compensation. In a way, the situation is similar with adjunct faculty. When more adjuncts are hired at a University or College, fewer full time, tenure track positions are created. This is bad for full time faculty, the institution, and adjunct faculty. Many adjuncts want full time employment and every time an adjunct position is filled, inadvertently a full time position becomes less likely.

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    3. Chris Avatar
      Chris

      I would like to see undergraduate workers unionized. But anecdotally at my institution their jobs are funded by federal work study. From what I understand those are dollars that would unavailable to pay staff.

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    4. Steve Avatar
      Steve

      My knee-jerk responses:
      First, how do we help unionize undergraduate student-workers in right-to-work states like mine? I guess I have a pretty cynical view of my students, but I really don’t see them electing to pay union dues even when they can’t be required to do so.
      Second, including undergraduate student-workers in an attempt to organize faculty would require changing the strategy dramatically. At least, it seems to me that focusing attention on contingent and tenure-track faculty members as teachers–for example, by electing to join the American Federation of Teachers as opposed to some other union–is often a good strategy for promoting votes and encouraging those outside the campus to take a friendly view of organizing faculty even in the face of nasty anti-union tactics. There might be an equally effective strategy that others know about (I know very little, really).

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