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Fair Labor Practices Proposed for Universities
There was considerable cause for celebration among roughly three hundred and fifty students, professors, and interested citizens who showed up at a church on the campus of New York University on November 16 for a public hearing on unfair labor practices at the university. Just two days before, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) revealed that NYU’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee had won a majority in an election to determine an official collective bargaining representative for campus graduate students. (The NLRB’s ruling regarding unionization of the NYU graduate students is discussed in this issue’s Legal Watch column.).
Speakers at the meeting, which was organized by Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice (SAWSJ) and cosponsored by the AAUP and a dozen other academic and labor organizations, called for universities and colleges to subscribe to a code of fair labor practices that would guarantee their employees’ right to organize and ensure decent working conditions, benefits, and pay. "Personal testimony from teaching assistants, hospital workers, adjuncts, and other university employees about their treatment by some of the nation’s leading educational institutions emphasized the need for such a code," reports Ellen Schrecker, Academe’s faculty editor, who attended the event.
Witnesses talked about subsisting on low pay and inadequate or nonexistent benefits while trying to form a union in the face of their employers’ hostility. When she and her colleagues began to organize, NYU graduate student LaDawn Hagland noted, university administrators claimed that the union would damage "educational quality." Her own experiences suggested otherwise, since she had been forced to take a second job once she discovered that after paying her rent, her mandatory health fees, and her commuting expenses, her graduate assistant salary left her about $35 a week to live on. "How," she asked, "does my working eighty hours a week improve educational quality?"
Adjunct faculty members are equally exploited, said Gary Zabel, co-chair of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) and a part-time philosophy teacher at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Not only are adjuncts discriminated against in their careers and "regarded as inferior members of their profession," he argued, "but with institutions paying an average of $2,500 a course, even those who teach four courses a semester earn barely $20,000 a year." In its campaign to organize Boston adjuncts, COCAL is demanding equal pay for equal work, full benefits and pensions, and consideration for full-time positions.
Besides their personal hardships, many of the witnesses also described how their employers resisted their attempts to organize. "It is outrageous," commented Columbia professor Eric Foner, "that universities such as Yale, NYU, and the University of Illinois not only refuse to bargain with their graduate students and other employees but also spend millions of dollars in antiunion legal maneuvering." Witnesses reported that intimidation, though subtle, has been equally widespread and especially effective among foreign students and workers who say they fear losing their resident status if the university takes action against them. At the end of the hearing, SAWSJ’s Cynthia Young pointed out that "the prevalence of such unfair tactics makes it all the more important that the academic community adopt a code of fair labor practices." The full text of the code is available at <www.rafo.org/articles/fair-labor-code.htm>.
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