W E   A R E   T H E   U N I O N !

The Graduate Teaching Assistant Adjunct Alliance Presents a Teach-In on
Improving Teaching Conditions at George Washington University
________________________________________________________________________

Featured Speakers Will Include:

STANLEY ARONOWITZ
Professor of Sociology at CUNY's Graduate School and University Center;
author of many books on issues in higher education including, The
Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True
Higher Learning and Education and the American Future.

CARY NELSON
Professor of English at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign;
author of many books on academic labor issues including, Manifesto of a
Tenured Radical, Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the
Crisis of the Humanities, and WIll Teach for Food: Academic Labor in
Crisis.

REPRESENTATIVE FROM NEW YORK UNIVERSITY'S GRADUATE STUDENT ORGANIZING
COMMITTEE (GSOC-UAW)

REPRESENTATIVE FROM GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY'S GRADUATE TEACHING
ASSISTANT ADJUNCT ALLIANCE (GTAAA-UAW)

REPRESENTATIVE FROM GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY'S FULL-TIME FACULTY
SUPPORT COMMITTEE

_____

  WHEN:  Wednesday, April 5 
 WHERE:  The Quad/Law Patio (G Street between 20th and 21st Streets,
         Washington, DC)
  TIME:  4 - 6 pm
_____

Sponsored by the National Lawyers Guild at GW, The Progressive Studnet
Union, and the Graduate Teaching Assistant Adjunct Alliance.
contact GTAAA at 202-822-8626 
 

Subject: CNN coverage of graduate student unionization efforts!
Date: Sat, 28 Aug 1999 22:17:49 -0400
From: "Noreen O'Connor" <noreen@gwu.edu>
To: gsc-sc@nwe.ufl.edu

[This piece first aired on 21 August 1999, but continues to air on CNN this
week]

Newsroom/World View
NEWSROOM for August 25, 1999
Aired August 25, 1999 - 4:30 a.m. ET

ANNOUNCER: Seen in classrooms the world over, this is CNN NEWSROOM.

TONY FRASSRAND, CO-HOST: It is Wednesday on NEWSROOM and the gang is all
here. I'm Tony.

CASSANDRA HENDERSON, CO-HOST: And I'm Cassandra. We're the gang.

FRASSRAND: Must be.

HENDERSON: Glad you're along for the ride. Today's theme: business.

FRASSRAND: They say that money makes the world go 'round. We'll go around
the world to show you how that happens.

*****

ANNOUNCER: Teachers, make the most of CNN NEWSROOM with our free daily
classroom guide to the program. There you'll find a rundown of each day's
show, so you choose just the program segments that fit your lesson plans.
Plus, there are discussion questions and activities. And the guide
highlights key people places and news terms.

Each day, find hot links to other online resources and previews of upcoming
"Desk" segments.

 It's all at this Web address, where you can also sign-up to have the guide
automatically e-mailed
directly to you each day. It's easy, it's free, it's your curriculum
connection to the news. After all, the news never stops and neither does
learning.

HENDERSON: Well, some students heading off to college this fall will notice
a growing trend at the head of the classroom: teachers doing full-time work
at part-time pay, especially at one Washington, D.C. university. And it
doesn't take a math whiz to figure out something just doesn't add up.

Kathleen Koch reports, the teachers are turning to unions for help.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I say justice, you say now! Justice!

GROUP: Now!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Justice!

GROUP: Now!

KATHLEEN KOCH, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's a chant echoing across
university campuses where teaching assistants and other part-timers, at last
count, make up 47 percent of the faculty. These graduate students at George
Washington University spend 20 or 30 hours a week on the courses they teach,
but get no benefits and make a fraction of what full-time professors make.

NOREEN O'CONNOR, GWU UNION ORGANIZER: I think we're being treated sort of as
migrant labor.

SHARON HANSCOM, GWU UNION ORGANIZER: We're living below the national poverty
line, and if you live in D.C., you know you cannot survive on $8,000 a year.

KOCH: Teaching assistants at 25 colleges have voted to unionize in order to
get better pay, benefits and working conditions, 10 in just the past two
years. Part-time professors at Yale and Berkeley even went out on strike.

CHRISTIAN SWEENEY, BERKELEY UNION ORGANIZER: We see youth joining unions as
a way to strengthen education and to protect our interests in the workplace.

KOCH: Full-time professors have been supportive.

(on camera): Resistance is coming primarily from university administrations,
ironically at a time when tuition and enrollments are up and most
universities are prospering.

(voice-over): But administrators say pay isn't the issue.

MICHAEL BAIRD, AMERICAN COUNCIL FOR EDUCATION: I think it's important that
there be a collegial environment on campus, and I would fear that
unionization would set up an adversarial relationship between students and
leadership in their departments and on the campus.

KOCH: So far, private universities have been unable to unionize.

DOUGLAS MCCABE, LABOR RELATIONS EXPERT: The Supreme Court ruled that private
university professors are in essence managerial employees and exempt from
unionization. That was a very controversial decision, and it basically
stalled unionization of private universities.

KOCH: That doesn't dissuade those working with the first two to try, G.W.
and New York University.

DANIEL BENDER, UAW ORGANIZER: The nature of academic work has changed so
dramatically that any past precedents really don't have that much meaning
any more.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What do we want?

GROUP: Union.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When do we want it?

GROUP: Now.

KOCH: For educators like O'Connor, if this doesn't work, they're ready to
quit.

O'CONNOR: For me and I think for many of us, this is what we feel is the
only way to save our profession.

Kathleen Koch for CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE) 

On January 19, 2000, George Washington University officially launched its anti-union campaign by circulating a memo in response to unionization efforts among graduate teaching assistants and adjunct faculty.  Up to this moment, the GTAAA-UAW had been quietly (and in a relatively routine manner) organizing for a period of three consecutive months.  The content of our first piece of anti-union literature appears at first glance to be standard fare.  Mid-way through the document, however, the Vice President of Academic Affairs inserts one sentence stating: “the effort to combine Graduate Teaching Assistants and part-time faculty into one collective bargaining unit is, as far as I know, unique to GW.” 

Before I address what might be “unique to GW,” but more likely not, which is the necessity to organize adjunct faculty and graduate teaching assistants into one bargaining unit, I believe it first important to contextualize our campaign within the very ordinariness of unionization.  The following account of the organizational efforts of the GTAAA (Graduate Teaching Assistant-Adjunct Alliance) is in many ways a fairly typical story of academic workers organizing within the context of a national trend towards unionization.  As I am writing this, there are approximately 25 recognized unions in the United States representing graduate student employees and an equal number of campaigns currently underway. 

The trajectory of our union campaign also closely follows the path of our predecessors to whom we are much indebted.  As is the case with many other movements, the GTAAA began organizing in response to the university’s profit-driven strategy of relying upon contingent academic employment  -- graduate students and part-time faculty -- to maintain low-cost labor and an easily expendable workforce.  According to the Vice President’s memo, George Washington University’s mode of operation will be severely compromised by unionization for some of the following reasons: management will no longer be able to contain threats of unfair labor practices and the university will lose control over its current hiring and firing flexibility.   Strikes, walkouts, contentious negotiations, and the disruption caused by the formation of a venue for the institutionally powerless are all given scrupulous attention throughout the report.  The substantive change the university appears to fear most is accountability, hence the repeated statements in future documents as well as the university’s web site regarding fear of “charges” of unfair labor practices.   The loss of profit and the forfeiture of unilateral decision-making are of course inscribed, particularly in the representation of the university as the benevolent protector of academic freedom.  And while all of this is stock anti-union doctrine, the GTAAA response has similarly been within the confines of academic labor unionism.  We believe that unionization is a means by which adjunct faculty and graduate student employees can address the issues in which our university has failed.  We, like others elsewhere, believe that we are an invaluable resource for the university, and that without our dedication and skills, our university could not function.  We also believe, as do others elsewhere, that we deserve a voice in decisions that affect our lives at our work site, our living standards in the city in which we live and our future in the academy overall.

Moreover, our own institutional history will most likely resonate with organizational efforts nationwide.  Here at George Washington University, adjunct faculty and graduate teaching assistants have a long history of attempting to remedy the poor working conditions through various committees and bureaucratic channels.  Likewise, individual agitation has proven time and again to be a political dead-end and for many at our university, the histories of individual struggle clearly resonate in nearly every department.  It’s no small matter that a sizable number of the adjuncts in our bargaining unit has long and bitter histories at this particular institution.  And the painfully slow attrition rate for doctoral candidates combined with the reality of jobless futures provide foundation for future rancor.

In September 1999, a jarring example well worth mentioning coincided with the inception of our unionization drive. The campus newspaper and university email  began widely reporting GW’s slip from the “Top 50 Colleges and Universities in the United States” in the annual U.S. News & World Report, for reasons including over-reliance upon part-time faculty, faculty/student ratio, and overall faculty salaries.   As one of the activists earnestly engaged in transforming individuals into organizers, or apathy into advocacy, I continue to anticipate few graduate student employees and adjunct faculty laying claim to the cultural capital of our institution of higher education given the stark reality of our present market value. Our past institutional failures, or struggles, depending on how one begins to approach the issues at stake, are thus meant as a testimonial of sorts to the concrete material conditions under which adjuncts and graduate student employees currently labor.

Meanwhile, anti-union literature from the school administration continues to reiterate the “uniqueness” of our organizing drive in its attempt to incorporate adjuncts and teaching assistants under one bargaining unit.  Explanations and insight into our organizational issues have not been forthcoming, as if our singularity in this campaign signifies an ahistorical process rather than our consciousness of irreconcilable antagonisms.  One could argue that this is a deliberate managerial strategy – mystify the issues that sustain class conflict and the university succeeds in dividing a workforce against itself.  Indeed, one of the educative missions of our union campaign is to continue to bring to the surface the affinities contingent workers share.  A quite lucid way of understanding the GTAAA-UAW campaign is to ask the question of what it means to build a graduate student/adjunct coalition.  Realistically, an organizer has five minutes of a worker’s time to simplify issues that are represented as “complicated.”  This becomes especially urgent when you are organizing a work site of approximately 1,800 people within a drastically concentrated time frame.  Thus, the challenges and organizational issues are one and the same: our material conditions at George Washington University are such that graduate teaching assistants and adjunct faculty perform the same labor under the same adverse conditions.  Any other explanation is ideology and all other attempts to categorize positions are mystification.  And yet, in the April edition of The Journal of Higher Education, an article on campus unionization states the following: 

Thus, what The Journal of Higher Education refers to as the potential dramatic restructuring of graduate education at private universities and what administrators at George Washington University label a “unique” situation are also one and the same.  When GTAAA organizers first began a union drive at GW, we initially went on the assumption we would be organizing a constituency of roughly 50% graduate teaching assistants and 50% adjunct faculty.  It has certainly been a lesson in “uniqueness” to discover that very few graduate students are employed under the category of “teaching assistant.”  The majority of our workforce -- graduate students, Ph.Ds, and post-docs alike – are, in fact, adjunct faculty performing the same work under the same conditions of labor.  Furthermore, administrative categories attempt to obscure the fact that teaching assistants and adjunct faculty experience similar conditions of exploitation: inadequate wages, lack of health care benefits, exclusion from departmental participation, lack of employment security, lack of academic freedom, and alienation resulting from any form of a supportive community environment. 

Organizing efforts have shed light on employment practices that include the reliance upon 95% adjunct faculty in one major department at GW.   There are also graduate departments where students are offered a teaching assistantship one semester followed by an adjunct position the next semester.   It is worth restating that this is equivalent labor performed under adversity within the period of one academic school year.  I began by attempting to locate George Washington University’s role within both the national as well as the normative context regarding academic unionization movements.  If the alarming statistics bear out, our institution will be well within the norm of contemporary labor practices.  However, it might also be accurate, for the moment, to concede to our Vice President when he describes our situation as “unique,” and if so, George Washington University is setting an undeniable trend that should put academic labor organizers on guard regarding the future of academic work. 

  ii.“Links to Academic Unions in the U.S. and Canada.”
 http://www.yale.edu/geso/unionlinks.html

   iii. George Washington University “The UAW at GW?  GW’s Response to the GTAAA.”
http://www.gwu.edu/nme.html

  iv.“Top 50 Colleges and Universities in the U.S.”  U.S. News and World Report.

   v. The Journal of Higher Education 

  vi. Music Department Homepage     http://www.gwu.edu/~music
   Office of Sponsored Research:    http://www.gwu.edu/~research

  vii. English Department: Faye Moskowtiz, Chair