The National Labor Relations Board finally got out of its own way after a decade of dithering, and ruled this week that grad students who double as teaching and research assistants who work at private universities do, in fact, have the right to organize and press their employers for better pay and working conditions.
D’uh.
The NLRB observed that there is no salient laws that would suggest that these workers should be singled out and deprived of their right to organize. Earlier rulings by the Board – as in 2004 – found the opposite, basically lying down to universities’ claims that organizing would harm the relationship between the schools and their students. There has been no such disruption in colleges where such unions have been formed, and note that 35,000 teaching a research assistants have formed unions across the country.
The reality is simply this: universities want to hold down their costs and will use whatever tactics to do so. This is the most blatant indication of the corporatizing of education, along with the rising salaries of top administrators, and don’t forget tuition costs, which are growing at a large multiple of inflation.
The editorial board of the NY Times offers this, pointing out that corporate universities are excising the tenure track model of academia, and replacing much of what professors used to do with low-paid alternatives:
In recent decades, as tenure-track positions at universities have declined precipitously, teaching and research — the mainstay of universities — have increasingly been taken up by adjunct faculty members and graduate assistants, without commensurate increase in pay, status or career opportunities. On many campuses, teaching and research assistants are essentially low-paid, white-collar workers, typically earning around $30,000 a year, most of whom will never get tenure-track positions.
The question going forward is the extent to which those new unions will help improve working conditions in academic life.
I think the question going forward is more broad than that: should white collar workers, in whatever industry, organize like the grad students and adjunct faculty have in academia? How else to counter the inequality that is baked into the economic system, and to counter the forces of corporatism?
The trick has been to maintain the pretense that non-blue-collar workers – the creatives, knowledge workers, and freelancers that make up the bulk of the white collar workforce – have more in common with the management than with the other workers, or with each other.After all, the story goes, you aspire to be a manager, don’t you? You read all that entrepreneurial, aspirational yah-yah boosterist leadership bilge on Medium, right? You’re not a worker, are you, sweating for your daily loaf? You have a calling, you’re chasing your dream, following your passion. You’re the next Steve Jobs, not Cesar Chavez, for Christ’s sake! You are a leader in the making, more like the millionaire running your company than the unionized cooks and clerks in the cafeteria, right?
Right.
There are no salient laws that block the creatives in marketing, the programmers in development, or even the sales guys from unionizing. Even better, the freelancers should do it, and demand a better deal, instead of getting screwed by paying both halves of their social security, non-existent benefits, and all the liabilities. (Note that Uber drivers are waking up, and bringing the on-demand behemoth to court for redress.)
No one is stopping the white collar workers from tearing down this façade except themselves.
Maybe it’s not as obvious in other industries, and certainly the folks in tech are getting large salaries relative to everyone else. But as the tech sector starts to make huge cuts – Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research says as many as 330,000 staff could be cut this year as part of what he calls a ‘deconstruction’ of the industry – we might expect that many occupations will start paying less, or what was formerly a steady, secure highly-compensated job will be filled by a freelancer for much less dough, and little or no security. Like all those former tenured professorships now being deconstructed into second-tier, ramen-pay jobs for adjunct faculty and grad students.
Maybe after the experience of unionizing while working to get their graduate degrees, all those research and teaching assistants – when transitioning to the world outside of academia – might consider unionization as sensible and normal, not just a weird retro 1930s thing that no one does anymore.
from Stowe Boyd http://www.stoweboyd.com/post/149464162557
