Where Have You Gone, Invisible Adjunct? A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You
This past week, the National Labor Relations Board reversed an earlier decision, and ruled that graduate student TA's can't form a union. This is, of course, being denounced as yet another crime of the current administration, as the three members who voted for the new decision were Republicans appointed by Bush.
For a contrary view, somewhat surprisingly, you can turn to Bob Park, who writes:
The National Labor Relations Board ruled that the relationship between graduate students and universities is primarily for educational purposes. Therefore, graduate students at private universities have no right to union recognition. This was the right thing to do. Unions typically negotiate job security and wage levels. Standardized wages might be a boon to twelfth-year students of 13th century Turkish ballet, but they would certainly hurt physics students. The harm that a diminished supply of graduate students could do to a research university far outweighs the benefits of job security. The last thing a student needs is a permanent career doing graduate work.
There's a bunch of stuff here that's worth looking at. Park is right about one thing-- while many graduate students are undeniably badly exploited by the current system, the students who are badly exploited are generally not physics students, or even science students in general-- when I was at Yale, the across-the-board salary being demanded by the nascent union was actually $1-2,000 less than the students in our group were already getting, and with a much lower teaching load. This is why grad student unionization movements often have trouble getting traction in the sciences.
From a strictly self-interested viewpoint, Park is right (snide, but right): unionization of grad students would not be a big gain for physics. (Though he's implicitly using the idea that minimum wage increases destroy jobs, which I gather from Crooked Timber and elsewhere is no longer really believed by sensible economists...)
On the other hand, though, as members of the academy, we should feel some obligation to care about the bigger picture, and the welfare of students in general, not just within our own discipline. Grad students in the humanities really are in a bad spot, and the benefits a union would provide for them would almost certainly outweigh the harm to students in the sciences. It's not enough that we don't abuse our own students-- we should try to ensure that no students are exploited, and allowing them to organize is one way to do that. From a broader perspective, this decision is a Bad Thing, even if it is a short-term benefit to some fields.
It occurred to me that this dilemma almost exactly parallels the relationship between tenure-track and adjunct/visiting faculty, that was the subject of so many posts by the late, lamented Invisible Adjunct. I'd love to know what she (and her many smart commenters) thinks about this, but alas, she's shut her site down, and moved on to other things...
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