President's Postings: The Right to Collectively Bargain

February 1, 2007: With a resolution about the legalization of collective bargaining for grad students coming before the Assembly on Feb. 9, 2007, I wanted to share my thoughts on this topic with you. If you have any thoughts or concerns, please feel free to contact me at lauracat-=AT=-umd.edu. Also let me know if you would like to add your name to the list of sponsors.

It should be our choice

I personally believe that whether or not grads at College Park decide collective bargaining is for us, the choice should be ours and the State should not legally bar us from recourse to this option. I have been giving some thought to various reasons why collective bargaining might be a good option for grad employees and I have laid them out below. The University has tried on a number of occasions in the past to address some of these issues. This is not an easy task and I don’t want to portray them as “the bad guys.” But the point of the matter is: these problems still exist. The University may have things to say on many of these issues, but I will let them do that for themselves. And you should feel free to ask them yourselves.

Important point: the right to collectively bargain does not obligate us to collectively bargain. In other words, supporting this resolution does not necessarily mean you support collective bargaining. It means you think it should be our choice.

Some Points to Bear in Mind:

• Collective bargaining is currently illegal for graduate employees in the state of Maryland. Currently, provisions of Senate Bill 207 of 2001 prohibit collective bargaining, and we hope you will consider supporting legislation to remove this prohibition.

• Without the right to collectively bargain, the University has less of an incentive to address our needs. If collective bargaining is a possibility, the University is much more inclined to address our needs. As things stand, there is a tremendous imbalance of power on campus, and the right to collectively bargain could help restore this. This imbalance of power is obviously very bad for graduate students -- but in the long run it's also bad for the University.

• Graduate student needs are not being met, ultimately to the detriment of the University. We all know this is a very expensive place to live, and graduate pay is not keeping up with rising cost of living. As an example, it is increasingly difficult to find affordable housing for graduate students. Students making the University-mandated minimum stipend who live in University-owned graduate student housing pay up to 87.5% of their take-home pay on rent alone. This is not acceptable. Despite University efforts, privatization has led to increasing rents that have not been matched by graduate student pay. This means that the University of Maryland is becoming a less attractive place to for graduate students to attend. We already know that high-quality graduate students are choosing to go to "lesser schools" (their words) because they cannot afford to live here.

• Most of our peer institutions have the right to collectively bargain, and they exercise this right. Two of the best graduate schools in the country, Berkeley and the University of Michigan, both have strong graduate student unions. (More info below.)

• Grievance procedures. Among the benefits of collective bargaining not currently available to UMCP graduate employees are standardized and effective grievance procedures for workplace abuse. We do have a graduate ombudsperson to help with conflict resolution, and she has done a tremendous service to graduate students. However, the graduate ombudsperson has no binding authority to resolve conflicts, and there is only one graduate ombudsperson for a population of 10,000 graduate students.

• We are not adequately compensated for our contribution to the University. Graduate students provide essential teaching and research support to the University, helping to secure the undergraduate tuition dollars that help enable an effective research institution to operate. For example, one English 101 TA brings in $95,268.88 in tuition dollars in one academic year, while being paid $16,704/year. (See Workload section below for more details.)

I would like to expand a little more on some of these issues – provide some more food for thought if you will.

Grievance Procedures:

There is a pervasive mythology in graduate student culture that unfair or even abusive treatment of students in advisory or workplace situations is “par for the course” of the grad-school experience. In the last several years, the University has taken steps to bolster the office of the Graduate Student Ombudsperson, but there is no University-wide basic grievance procedure that can be followed by students seeking redress for untenable workplace situations.

These kinds of protections are provided to staff members at the University who are currently unionized and enjoy collective bargaining, however, graduate employees – who are still employees of the State of Maryland – enjoy no such protections. This is particularly hard to justify in light of the fact that all but one of the University’s “peer institutions” currently allow collective bargaining by graduate employees.ⁱ

Cost of Living – Affordable Housing:

One of the big factors motivating graduate students to seek collective bargaining as an option is the cost of living in the D.C. metro housing market. There are essentially two ways in which to ensure affordable housing for graduate students: 1) provide it in a University subsidized setting, 2) ensure that graduate students are getting paid enough to afford market rate housing.

In 1995, the University decided to privatize its two main graduate housing developments – now known as Graduate Gardens and Graduate Hills. During the planning phase of this initiative administrators identified two of the crucial outcomes sought through the privatization as:

• “Retain as Much access to the apartments by UMCP graduate students as possible”
• “Keep the housing affordable”ⁱⁱ

So we have to ask ourselves: how effective was privatization in achieving these goals? The chart below details the cost of various scales of apartments in these now privatized developments since 1995. The value in % on the bottom line of each column indicates the increase between 1995 and 2006 based on actual rents charged in each year.

The column on the far right indicates the increase in rent since 2001 when the last attempt was made to initiate collective bargaining on campus. In response to the ensuing pressure over rents, the University administration began negotiations with the private landlords of the properties in question to try and slow rent increases. As you will see, these efforts have helped, but the cost is still high.

ⁱⁱⁱ

By comparison with the figures above, the compensation of graduate students has increased slowly. Despite recent year on year increases to the University mandatory minimum stipend of nearly 10%, as of 2007, a graduate student making that mandated minimum and living in University endorsed graduate housing, might pay as much as 87.5% of his or her take home income in rent alone!^iv

In 2005, a University convened task force on Graduate Student Life identified the high cost of housing as one of the most important issues to be addressed. Clearly, despite good intentions, the best efforts of the University to tackle this problem over the course of the last decade have met serious challenges.^v

I for one am very excited by the fact that we will be getting new, affordable grad housing on the East campus development – and we have the University to thank for that! However, the project is still many years away from completion and it is important to address near term affordability as well.

Workload:

We all know graduate students make a serious financial contribution to the University. We teach large numbers of undergraduates in both lecture and discussion settings helping to justify the money spent by the University educating them. Beyond graduate assistants, a large number of graduate employees fall under the non-tenured faulty category as contracted lecturers. People in this category teach an increasing amount of course hours according to a recent University System report. The same report, published in 2007, acknowledges that across the System efforts to measure the contribution of non tenured/tenure track faculty to the teaching workload of Universities is in it early stages.^vi

Example: English 101 (a course teaching most undergraduate students who pass through the University and employing many graduate students in disciplines beyond the English Department)

• An English 101 Teaching Assistant teaches a total of 69 students in an academic year (3 sections of 23 students, 2 sections in the fall and 1 in the spring). The class is 3 credits, so this TA teaches a total of 207 credit hours. A Lecturer teaches 2, 3 or sometimes 4 sections per year. So, one English 101 TA teaches a total of 207 credit hours in one academic year.

• In-state tuition: $273.58/credit hour (An in-state undergrad pays $3283 per semester for 12 credits).

• Out-of-state tuition: $833.54/credit hour (An out-of-state undergrad pays $10002.50 per semester for 12 credits).

• Roughly 1/3 of undergrads are out-of-state. So out of an English 101 TA's 207 credit hours taught in one year break down this way:
  138 in-state credit hours  X $273.58/credit hour = $37,754.50
  69 out-of-state credit hours  X $833.54/credit hour = $57,514.38

This does not factor in Tuition Remission and the other costs that the University bears in educating us. But let’s not fool ourselves – the University is getting a huge return on its investment. It is a truism that undergraduate tuition pays for graduate education, but it is also true that cheap graduate labor subsidizes the research and teaching that helps support tenured faculty in many departments, even those that aren’t raking in the undergrad tuition dollars.

Our contributions are not recognized or properly rewarded.

I hope you will support legislation which will give us the right to collectively bargain.

Laura Moore
GSG President
lauracat-=AT=-umd.edu

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ⁱThe exception is UNC Chapel Hill.

ⁱⁱKennedy, Tom and Jacqueline Rogers. University of Maryland at College Park : Graduate Student Housing Privatization Initiative. Office of Executive Programs, University of Maryland School of Public Affairs, 1996-1998, pp. 2.

ⁱⁱⁱThese numbers based on actual rents charged to students. Documentation for relevant periods will be supplied upon request with the names of students withheld for privacy reasons.

^ivBased on actual current rents and minimum stipends. Pay stubs and rent invoices for individual students will be supplied upon request with names withheld for privacy reasons.

^vReport of the Task Force on Graduate Student Life. University of Maryland, Division of Student Affairs: November, 2005, pp. 21.

^viReport on the Workload of USM Faculty Board of Regents, Committee on Education Policy: Information Item, Jan. 24, 2007, pp. 1-2, 5.

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Resolution Authors and Sponsors:

Authors: Devin Ellis, GSG Chief-of-Staff (PUAF), Hellmut Lotz (GVPT), Laura Moore, GSG President (ENTM)

Sponsors:
Ebony Dashiell, GSG Representative (EDHD)
Billy Grayson, Graduate Senator (PUAF)
Kyle Gustafson, GSG Vice President for Student Affairs (PHYS)
Kristina Heuck, GSG Vice President for Community Development (ANSC)
Jennifer Nolan, GSG Vice President for Financial Affairs (AMST)
Lisa Pfeifer, Graduate Senator (BIOL)
Danny Rogers, Graduate Senator (CMPS)
Aaron Tobiason, GSG Vice President for Legislative Affairs

Sponsors to be added at Friday's meeting:
Heather Mann, Graduate Senator (EDUC)

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Graduate Student Unions at our Peer Institutions:

University of Michigan Graduate Employees' Organization

University of California System Graduate Employee Union (includes UCLA and UC Berkeley)

Graduate Employees Organization at UIUC (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

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Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions

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Legal Background:

2001 bill (S.B. 207) which granted the right to collectively bargain to staff employees, but not to graduate employees (.pdf file).

Background on S.B. 207 of 2001.

Section of Maryland Code dealing with graduate employees and collective bargaining.