Stonewalled, Disrespected, and Dismissed

At colleges and universities across the country, from Duke to the University of Maryland, from Johns Hopkins to Santa Clara University, a heated battle is playing out right now over workers’ right to unionize. The administrative class is often openly antagonistic to the very notion that students, graduate students, and faculty have the right to collectively bargain. In Maryland, that antagonism has been on full display in recent weeks as members of the Maryland State House and Senate held hearings on and deliberated a collective bargaining bill that would dramatically reshape labor relations at the University System of Maryland campuses, Morgan State University, and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. “This bill differs from similar legislation proposed in the past,” Natalie Weger notes in The Diamondback, an independent student newspaper, “because it extends unionization rights to faculty on the tenure-track, nontenure track and part-time, rather than only to graduate assistants.”

Too often, university administrators treat the right to organize as, at best, an annoying formality and, at worst, a problematic entitlement that they can choose not to honor — and, if they have the resources and disposition, must make it their mission to eliminate. This is the rationale behind the Duke University administration’s deplorable decision to not only refuse to recognize and bargain with its graduate-student union, but to pursue legal action that, if successful, would overturn the National Labor Relations Board’s 2016 ruling and strip all graduate students at private universities of their right to collectively bargain.

I spoke about higher-ed workers’ fight for collective-bargaining rights in Maryland, and the national implications of that fight, with Karin Rosemblatt, professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park and vice president for the University of Maryland chapter of the American Association of University Professors, Nate Beard, a Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant at the university’s College of Information Studies and alliances chair for UMD’s Fearless Student Employees, and Sam DiBella, a Ph.D. candidate and research assistant at the university’s College of Information Studies and co-chair of organizing and media for UMD’s Fearless Student Employees.

Maximillian Alvarez: So, why do faculty, part-time faculty, and certain graduate students at the University System of Maryland, Morgan State University, and St. Mary’s College not have the right to collectively bargain? How common is this around the country?

Karin Rosemblatt: This is a holdover from another era. In 1935, when the National Labor Relations Act was passed, it excluded all state workers. While workers in some states won collective-bargaining rights, and some states even made it a constitutionally protected right, other states, especially those in the South, have continued to deny this right to public workers. In 2001, Maryland state workers won collective bargaining, but faculty and students were explicitly excluded from that law. It’s puzzling that this restriction is still in place in a blue state like Maryland where equity is part of the stated mission of our public universities.

Nate Beard: It’s wild, right? Graduate students have collective-bargaining rights if we work at private universities, but not in Maryland public universities.

Sam DiBella: Lack of bargaining rights is a widespread problem in the Maryland public sector — public librarians, for example, proposed a similar bill this year. Maryland’s community-college employees only just won their bargaining rights at the end of 2021.

MA: How has the lack of collective-bargaining rights for so many higher-education workers in Maryland shaped the state’s higher-ed system itself?

NB: Lack of labor rights has severely harmed our ability to perform research and teaching duties. When I started at UMD I was making around $23K before taxes, and my colleague was making $19K/year, which forced her to drop out shortly after the pandemic hit. We live paycheck to paycheck. We can’t put our best effort into designing curricula, teaching undergrads, or conducting cutting-edge research, much less doing our own research to finish our degrees. This undermines the university’s commitment to diversity and inclusion too. International students pay extra fees and are not allowed to find employment outside the university. Non-white students from poor and historically oppressed communities are excluded when the university pays poverty wages.

SD: In the current meet-and-confer process (what we have instead of collective bargaining), Steve Fetter, dean of the graduate school, has argued that the university should not have to account for transportation costs when the university sets stipend rates. The administration has refused to honor third-party cost-of-living estimates. We go to them with stories of grads living on food stamps, parenting while holding down second or third jobs, trapped in abusive labs with no path to graduate, and they tell us that they have concerns about our survey-sampling methods. The word for their attitude in these meetings is “contempt.”

They don’t take this issue seriously. They stonewall us in private rooms and emails, and then go into public hearings where they claim they’re paragons of workplace democracy. There is no grad-worker support for the model of “shared governance” the University System of Maryland uses.

It turns out the report USM used to justify meet-and-confer was entirely written by their administrators. In a 2009 letter of dissent to the Maryland General Assembly, the workgroup’s graduate representatives wrote that “we were presented with and asked to endorse a report that not only failed to represent our beliefs, but may potentially damage the ability of graduate assistants and adjunct faculty to organize in the future.” (Who knew!) The USM’s experiments in shared governance were doomed from the start by their own refusal to allow any meaningful input from grads and adjuncts. They acted in bad faith then, and they are acting in bad faith now.

KR: The USM touts the centrality of equity to its mission, and then it turns around and fights against its own workers seeking the democratic right to collective bargaining. Studies show that collective bargaining strengthens mechanisms of shared governance. It can also make universities more efficient and more effective. We give up a lot when upper administration has a quasi carte blanche.

Let me give an example. Top administrators see faculty and graduate-assistant salaries only through the logic of the bottom line. As a result, USM faculty salaries are down 4 percent from 2010 to 2022 — and that takes into consideration both cost-of-living and merit raises. Some USM instructional faculty can earn as little as $2,100 for a course, or $14/hour, according to AAUP data. The gender disparity at UMD-CP and the University of Maryland at Baltimore is second greatest compared to peers. Faculty and graduate-student salaries are among the lowest in our peer group when you adjust for the sky-high cost of living in the Baltimore-Washington region.

This decision by the USM administration to not invest in its employees has real impacts on the quality of research and education we provide. It is hard for institutions to attract and keep the best faculty, and that obviously hurts students. Overworked faculty and graduate assistants struggling to get by on poverty-level wages are not able to provide the best education possible to Maryland students.

It’s hard to imagine that we would have reached this state if we had a unified, collective voice able to bargain contracts.

MA: What do you say to critics who insist that faculty members already have some form of collective bargaining in faculty shared governance?

KR: Faculty in state public-education institutions — even those who have not yet thought about unionization — are unanimous in viewing shared governance as broken. We’ve seen egregious efforts to curb faculty voice and the independence of public universities in Georgia, Texas, and Florida. But there are subtle, insidious ways in which administrators circumvent shared governance. When most faculty lack tenure and their job security rests with administrators, they fear speaking out.

Probably the most telling example, however, is the way university administrations thwart any attempts by university senates to provide even a modicum of financial oversight. At College Park, the senate put in place a budget-oversight committee. It never got the support it needed to function properly and hasn’t met recently. Last spring, College Park faculty crowdsourced funding and commissioned an expert in higher-education finances to do an independent analysis. AFSCME [the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees], which represents staff on our campus, chipped in. We learned that the number of employees in management has grown 42 percent in only 4 years. And while undergraduate enrollment grew 16 percent, the number of faculty only went up 3.1 percent, and the number of tenure-track faculty declined. Meanwhile, salaries for upper administration, deans, and associate deans had gone up sharply. For athletic administrators, salaries were up a whopping 63 percent from 2013 to 2020. We also discovered that administrators covered years of athletics deficits by charging students mandatory “athletics” fees, amounting to nearly $132.5 million in subsidies from 2013-20 alone.

If shared governance really existed, faculty would be able to intervene and change the universities’ directions on all of these points. That could never happen currently.

MA: Given all the other explosions of worker struggles within higher education — graduate students’ unionization efforts and strikes in California and at the Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Northeastern, and Indiana Universities, etc.; nontenure-track and tenure-track faculty strikes/near strikes in the University of California system, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the New School, in New York City, etc.; even higher-ed workers across the U.K. are on strike — how do you see this fight in relation to what appears to be a broader groundswell throughout the world of higher ed?

SD: Our current upswing is definitely due to the support of other grad unions. Solidarity is a material force in this fight. Organizers from Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, U. of Chicago, U. of Indiana, UC, and beyond have met with us and shared lessons from their workplace struggles. Groups like the Higher Education Labor Union and the Graduate Student Action Network have become places where higher-ed organizers can collect industrywide data and learn from each other.

NB: Yeah, I see our fight as part of a broader struggle to take back our higher-ed institutions and make them more responsive to the needs of students and workers — make it so that they actually support teaching and research that benefits the public and society. To invest in science, universities need to invest in grads who are working to be scientists and those of us teaching the scientists of tomorrow. Higher-ed workers across the country are demanding better conditions and more democratic rights, and we hope to be a part of that and hope to get Maryland higher ed to be a leader in public service too.

MA: Why now? And what are folks doing to support you in this fight?

KR: In Maryland, we now have a Democratic governor and a Democratic majority in both houses of the Maryland General Assembly. Knowledge-based jobs are important to our state economy, and we don’t rely much on industry for tax revenue. Marylanders favor public investment in higher education. We’re asking Marylanders, who after all fund higher education, to contact their state legislators and the members of the House Appropriations and Senate Finance Committees, as well as the House and Senate leaders, to tell them to give us collective-bargaining rights. Higher-ed workers outside Maryland should organize, organize, organize and join together with other higher-ed workers. It’s time to give faculty and graduate-student workers the rights they have been denied. Maryland and its students will benefit.