Fight Fight Unionize

The grad students at Columbia are raising a ruckus to unionize. NYTimes article here. Here at the University of Iowa they unionized some time ago as COGS, or the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students. COGS is a local of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE). That struck me as slightly odd when I was a graduate student here and still does. The unions are mostly organized around the working trades obviously, and graduate students seem an ill fit with a union of machine workers. But ultimately the goals are similar—better working conditions, benefits, and pay. Thanks to the COGS (I was a member), my pay as a Teaching Assistant (TA) was relatively good. Pre-COGS the pay was abysmal; the lowest in the Big 10 as I recall. And that is at the heart of the matter. Large universities are using TA’s for big chunks of their undergraduate teaching. It is not just training for futures in academia, but it is also very much like a regular job—you’re responsible for your students, maintain regular office hours and lecture times. So it is reasonable that graduate students be paid for the amount of responsibility they’re taking over. We’re not talking about huge amounts of money here, but previously TA’s were paid poverty wages, which maybe sounds fair, they’re students, right? But many grad students have families to support and such. The trend to unionize has already passed through most large public universities. The resistance has been stronger at some of the private universities like Harvard and Columbia. But even now that resistance is crumbling. Mass protests by grad students bring bad PR, and universities, at least under pressure, are willing to do something to address that. I was once a member of COGS, and while graduate students may not have a lot conceptually in common with electricians, the union did help to bring higher wages and better benefits to the graduate students who choose to work as teaching assistants and research assistants. Be a COG and get involved.