EDITORIAL – Grad students don’t need protection of unions

For years graduate students across the nation have accepted the grunt work of university… For years graduate students across the nation have accepted the grunt work of university faculty members, grading papers, teaching and doing research for little to no money.

Now, graduate students in several states are demanding the right to unionize, in order to receive collective bargaining rights to negotiate stipend pay, benefits and workloads with university administrators and allow them to strike if their requests aren’t met.

According to the Washington Post, a Maryland lawmaker will introduce legislation today backed by students at the University of Maryland that would permit graduate students and adjunct professors at Maryland’s public universities to form unions. Similar battles for unionization have received limited success at public universities in Michigan, New Jersey, Oregon and Wisconsin.

On average, graduate students earn a stipend of about $14,000 – an income that is difficult to live on, particularly while paying for tuition, books and rent. This financial reality forces most graduate students to take out loans, sometimes adding on to debt accrued while earning their undergraduate degrees.

Opponents of graduate student unionization claim that graduate students are students and not employees, a distinction that is sometimes difficult to make when examining the tasks that most graduate students take on. Like faculty members, graduate students teach and do research, but like undergraduates, they are still students, working and paying tuition to earn degrees and valuable experience that will hopefully propel them to future career success.

The bottom line is that the position of graduate students in academia is difficult to define, but so is their position in the workforce.

Graduate students who teach and do research deserve fair treatment and an appropriate work environment. But for students these types of rights should already be protected. Most graduate schools have student representatives who bring their concerns and grievances directly to university administrators.

Allowing graduate students to unionize also opens the door to undergraduates who get paid for academic work. While students at all levels of organization deserve fair compensation for their additional work – be it academic credit or monetary stipend, this work is, in fact, reinforcing those students’ educations.

We support the rights of graduate students, but we don’t believe that it is appropriate for them to unionize. While they take on other duties, graduate students are still in fact students – not employees.

We believe that they should organize on the university level to demand better pay and fair conditions but not under the umbrella of a union.