The University of Wisconsin at Madison says it believes international students would be putting their visas at risk if they joined a new union for graduate research assistants, but an e-mail message that was part of an exchange between senior officials at the institution last year suggests that the university didn’t always take that position.
The e-mail message, obtained by The Chronicle, was written about a month before state lawmakers approved a bill that allows research assistants in the University of Wisconsin system to form a union. But because of a special provision requested by the university, the legislation bars international students from joining—an exclusion the institution has said is for the students’ own protection.
In the message, Stephen R. Lund, then the institution’s director of the academic-personnel office, wrote that “technically there is no impact” on international research assistants “if state law recognizes them as employees for collective-bargaining purposes,” because the work hours of students with J-1 and F-1 visas are for the most part limited to 20 hours a week.
Also in the message, Mr. Lund wrote that he didn’t believe that the institution would be able to mount “a very strong argument” that international research assistants would have “a lot more room to operate” if they weren’t part of a union, as the university says it believes is the case.
Determining Status
In an interview on Monday, Mr. Lund, who is now the institution’s interim director of human resources, said the e-mail message was written “early on” as part of a “back-and-forth exchange” among university officials about what it would mean for international students who are research assistants to be represented by a collective-bargaining unit. In the end, he said, “we arrived at a different conclusion than” what was detailed in the e-mail message.
That conclusion, said Mr. Lund, was that American students would become employees, rather than merely remaining scholars, in July 2010 when the law giving them collective-bargaining rights becomes effective. That distinction, if applied to international students, he said, would trigger the 20-hour work-week restriction, curtailing the number of hours they could spend working in laboratories.
All research assistants have long been considered scholars by the institution, not employees. Maintaining scholar status is critical for international students, he says, because of the visa restrictions on their work hours.
“We think the whole 20-hour limitation hinges on whether they’re an employee or a scholar, so that’s why it’s important to us that they remain scholars,” Mr. Lund said on Monday. “The primary purpose of an RA is to work on their own thesis or dissertation, and so they’re working on research that furthers their own interests. Our sole concern was to try to protect international students’ ability to spend the amount of time they wanted to in the lab and not make it difficult for them to finish their degrees.”
The university’s interpretation of how union membership would jeopardize the visa status of foreign students has drawn criticism from union activists who point to other universities, such as the University of Washington and the University of Oregon, that have unionized graduate student researchers, including international students, without any problems.
Motives Questioned
Union leaders and independent observers said that the University of Wisconsin at Madison appears to have an ulterior motive in excluding international students from the union.
“This seems to be their strategy to have as few members in the bargaining unit as possible,” said Jill Bakken, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, which has a bargaining unit representing teaching assistants at Madison and wants to add research assistants there to the ranks. “It’s really disappointing.”
Of the 2,500 research assistants at Madison, about 700 are international students. Meanwhile, a union for teaching and project assistants at Madison, the oldest of its kind in the nation, represents 2,900 graduate students, about 400 of whom hold F-1 and J-1 visas, said Peter Rickman, president of the group.
“From our perspective, the shortchanging of basic fundamental worker rights, whether it’s international grad student workers now, or something else later, is unacceptable,” Mr. Rickman said.
Allowing international students to be part of one bargaining unit and not another, said Kathleen C. Walker, an immigration lawyer who is general counsel of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, “looks like a situation where state law isn’t tracking federal law. The fundamental thing is all the dots aren’t connecting here.”
Mr. Lund, however, insists that protecting international graduate students was the institution’s only motive.
“If we’re proven wrong, we’d have no problem bargaining with them,” Mr. Lund said. “But we’re feeling pretty confident that we’re right.”
