Union FAQ for scientists

We should have some say in our compensation and in our working conditions.  Right now we have
none.

Yes, it would be nice to have a slightly larger stipend, to have a better benefits package
(including dental and vision insurance), to have a better grievance procedure, and to have our
compensation and working conditions improved in a number of other specific ways.  But these are
subsidiary reasons.  Even if you are basically happy with your compensation and working conditions,
as many scientists are, you still deserve a voice.

The types of issues that the Union would bargain over are issues that are not department-
specific.  These issues include things like health and other insurance, stipend raises, and a
grievance procedure.

The Union would not bargain on specific, departmental matters.  For instance, in the NYU contract
(negotiated by UAW), it says (ARTICLE XXII, Section B.) "Decisions regarding who is taught, what is
taught, how it is taught, and who does the teaching involve academic judgment and shall be made at
the sole discretion of the University."

Finally, the best way to make sure that your interests are represented in the Union is by actively
representing yourself and your department.

a) It's not true that the Union is, or would be, mostly Humanities students.  There are
roughly 1900 TAs and RAs.  About half are TAs and half are RAs.  Of the TAs, slightly less than
half are scientists, but of the RAs, nearly all are scientists.  So, overall, about well more than
half of the Union membership would consist of scientists.

Incidentally, even if it were true that there would be more Humanities students in the Union, this
would not be cause for concern.  Their economic hardship may be different, but their economic
interests are the same as ours.

b) Simply put, the total possible compensation available to us is not strictly limited, as the
Administration would have you believe.  The University is currently spending $20 million to
renovate President Bollinger's home.  It spends hundreds of millions of dollars per decade buying
up property in Manhattan.  It feeds the $5 billion endowment.  Although the University is non-
profit, this just means that they save money on taxes.  It doesn't mean that they don't take in
more money than it costs to run a university.  So there is more money that could go to us.

Perhaps a few practical points would be even more reassuring:
(i) The Humanities students are nearly all making the same amount per annum as the Science
students.  They make less each year because they are paid for only 9 months.  No one would suggest
that they should make more per annum than Science students.  (Although, would you really be upset
even if Humanities students made twice the stipend that you make, so long as your stipend were
increased, too?)
(ii) At the nearly 40 other unionized graduate schools around the country, no Science students have
seen their stipends suffer as a result of unionization.  Rather, the general trend is that every
class of students sees dramatic improvements in compensation after unionization.
(iii) Most Science students are supported by the University for only 2 years, with their funding
coming from their advisors for the rest of their time here.  So only those 2 years are even in the
same slice of the pie as money for Humanities students.  In other words, there isn't much money
that the University pays to Science students that even could be milked to pay Humanities
students in the HIGHLY unlikely scenario that anyone would suggest doing that.

This is not what the Union is all about.  You deserve some say in how you are compensated.
Right now you have none.  And the graduate students as a whole certainly deserve to be heard on the
issue of whether they want a collective voice!  The University is subverting a democratic process.

Not really.  GSAC can only suggest -- there is no obligation for the University to listen and,
empirically, no one does listen.

GSAC gives us no power to bargain collectively for a contract.  The University therefore can, and
does, capriciously change our working conditions (for example, they changed our health care for the
worse this past year).

Some perspective:
In 1999, graduate students who had spent years trying to effect changes through GSAC started trying
to organize a union on campus.  In March of 2002, graduate students voted on whether we wanted to
unionize.  The University has used its vast resources and influence to prevent counting the votes
for more than 2 years and counting.  THAT's how much Columbia wants to listen to what graduate
students have to say.

UAW represents more TAs and RAs than any other union in the country.  It is a strong, progressive
union.  Graduate students represented by UAW at other universities are very happy with their
representation.  Furthermore, UAW is already on campus -- they represent the support staff, for
example -- so they have experience dealing with the Columbia Administration.

No.

There are two factoids that have been twisted by Columbia Administration to make it sound like UAW
is opposed to foreign workers and environmental standards for cars and SUVs.

One is UAW's supposed opposition to expanding the H1B visa program.  The H1B is a crappy visa that
ties workers to a single employer.  Once a worker on an H1B loses his/her job, he/she has 3 days to
leave the country!  As a worker on an H1B visa, you have virtually no labor rights, because your
employer can hold the threat of firing you over your head.  It actually would be perfectly
reasonable to lobby for eliminating the H1B visa and entirely replacing it with a better visa.  In
1994, there was a proposal to expand the number of H1B visas given out per year.  UAW lobbied for a
less extreme position than entirely eliminating the H1B -- instead, they argued that if the program
would be increased, it should also be improved.  This position was not contrary to the interests of
foreign workers; rather, it was directly in the interests of foreign workers.

The other factoid is that several years ago, UAW did not lobby for a bill requiring better fuel
efficiency that was supported by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups.  This is true, but
(i), UAW did not lobby against this bill, and (ii), UAW has supported a number of other laws
about environmental standards, in conjunction with such groups as the Sierra Club.  See, for
example, this link.

Although UAW's history is not perfect, neither is that of any institution.  And they have a much
better record in terms of progressive labor policy than the Columbia Administration, which invests
its endowment in many companies that have atrocious labor policy.
 

This situation sounds highly implausible.  "The Union" is not an external body that would
impose its will on us.  We ARE the Union.  UAW would provide legal counsel, negotiators, and
valuable advice.  But they have no agenda for us.  We would determine our own agenda, and vote on
our own contract.

If you want to see the Union pay more attention to something, get involved.  There will be a few
dozen "stewards" elected from different departments who will represent their departments' views
on the Union steering committee.  Become your department's steward, or let him/her know what you
want.  Remember, right now you have no say in the University's agenda as regards the graduate
school (or anything else).  The Union will give you a voice.

In the HIGHLY unlikely event that we would want to disband the union, this is perfectly possible,
as well.  Just as a simple vote is all that it takes to get a union (except for when the University
stalls the process in the courts for 26+ months), a simple vote is all that is required to disband
a union.

Yes, we are students.  No one disputes this.  But we are also employees.  The University pays
us in return for work that we do.  Our monthly paycheck is not a dividend check and it is not a
gift.  There are only a small number of reasons why an institution would pay a person, and once the
alternatives have been eliminated, employment is all that is left.  There is ample legal precedent
for this judgment.

To quote from the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB's) decision in the NYU case,

Even if you don't buy the argument that we are employees, there is still nothing wrong with
unionizing.  A union will still give you a voice in determining your compensation and your working
conditions, where you currently have none.

But a few more words about why a TA is an employee:
If our teaching isn't work, what is it?  The Administration's claim is that it's part of our
education.  But does the Administration do anything to teach us about teaching?  Yes, there are a
few seminars on education during the year, but they are often run by graduate students, and they
constitute far less training than would even be expected at most jobs.  Does the Administration (or
our department, for that matter) do anything to evaluate our teaching?  No.  And finally, if we
were truly required to teach for our own education, it would be the weakest teachers who would most
need this education.  And yet the University has a tacit policy of allowing the weakest and the
least interested teachers to shirk their teaching requirement.

The claim that it would is one of the more perplexing claims made by the Administration.  The
faculty are not our employers.  We would not bargain with them for a contract.  We would bargain
with the Administration.  It is entirely unclear why having a union would in any way adversely
affect our relationships with faculty.

A recent study at Tufts indicated that 9 out of 10 faculty members at unionized campuses nationwide
feel that their relationships with students were unaffected by unionization.

In March of 2002, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) held an election on campus to see
if a majority of Columbia TAs and RAs wanted to unionize.  Columbia launched an appeal with the
NLRB of their decision that TAs and RAs at private universities are employees who are entitled to
unionize under protection from the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).  Until that appeal is ruled
upon, the votes will not be counted.

The Union steering committee is confident based on followup interviews that unionization won.  The
Administration claims to be confident that unionization lost.  They refuse to drop their appeal,
however, and let the votes be counted.

During this past year, a majority of graduate students have signed union-support cards, giving a
clear indication that a current majority of the graduate students want to be part of a union.

The Administration refused to honor the democratic process of voting.  They now continue to refuse
to honor the democratic will of the graduate students.  In light of their continued intransigence,
we have taken the unpleasant but necessary step of declaring a strike.  Unfortunately, Columbia
has shown that they will not listen to the democratic voice of the students.  The only power we
students have, then, is to withhold our labor until the Administration drops its indefensible
position of ignoring democracy.

Incidentally, the University opposes labor unions almost reflexively.  The Board of Directors of
Columbia is chaired by David Stern, commisioner of the NBA and strong opponent of the NBA Player's
Association.  The rest of the Board is practically taken from a Who's Who list of Fortune 500
executives.  These people fight workers' rights on a daily basis.

Our concerns are not the same as those of some workers who face illegal, hazardous conditions in
their jobs every day, and who need a union as a matter of life and death.  But it is interesting to
note that the rhetoric used by the Administration is nearly identical (except with the appropriate
nouns translated to an academic context) to rhetoric historically used to bust unions and to keep
power in the hands of management.

Because it's not supposed to work like this.  It's not supposed to be this hard to get a union.
You're supposed to hold a unionization-election, count the votes, and then either have a union or
not, depending on the vote.  The Administration and the Republican-controlled National Labor 
Relations Board have conspired to make the process of getting a union recognized seem not only
difficult but damn near impossible.  They've forced us to strike, for goodness sake, and no one
likes striking!  This is why striking graduate students are so frustrated.

Yes, of course.  But it's not clear that there are an awful lot of issues where you can
improve the world more through your action.  Remember the slogan, "Think globally, act locally."
Your voice, for or against the union, is a lot louder than your voice for or against the war in 
Iraq, for instance.  The philosophical point is that we do what we can to make the world better,
not necessarily just working on the "most important" issues.  An alternative way to put it is that
perhaps, from a personal calculus, what is important to strive for is not righting the worst
injustices, but rather improving those conditions for which the combination of their impact on us
and our likelihood of succeeding is greatest.

 (Incidentally, this is why when you are hungry, you feed yourself, not every hungry person, even
though the latter cause is surely more imporant.  When you are hungry, (i) it affects you personally and
(ii) you can succeed in improving the situation.)

This is a chance for you to participate in a real labor struggle, striking a blow for labor,
against management.  Will the strike succeed?  It will if we make it succeed.  It won't if, because
of apathy or fear, we don't make it succeed.

Finally, this struggle is not just about us.  There are a lot of students at universities, public
and private, around the country who are depending on us to continue our struggle and to make a
strong stand against the University Administration.  This is not to say that you owe it to
students at Berkeley or Yale or Penn to go on strike.  But if your concern is that this struggle is
worthwhile but too small-scale to be truly important, you should realize that the scale of our
struggle is larger than you may have thought.