This Viewpoint is written in response to Nahtahna Cabanes's "Congratulations to WHUT on its campaign," in the Feb. 21st Daily.
It is strange that Cabanes would begin her Viewpoint congratulating and expressing gratitude to WHUT, because I feel we owe her a debt of gratitude. ASET rhetoric often suggests the union issue is exclusively a graduate student vs. administration issue, with no possible middle ground. For example, compare the ASET and WHUT websites (at http://www.tuftsgrads.org/ and http://www.geocities.com/whut-01/ respectively). One links only to pro-union material, the other links to articles and organizations on both sides, pro and con. By taking WHUT seriously, Cabanes effectively concedes the reality of the issue: two groups of graduate students with opposing ideas on how best to improve graduate education at Tufts.
Nonetheless, Cabanes takes issue with some of the points raised by the e-mail, and her well-articulated points deserve to be answered.
The WHUT e-mail argues that, as graduate students, we have a diverse range of issues and needs that a union would inherently obscure. Cabanes wishes to allay that concern by pointing out that the projected union "does not apply to all Tufts graduate students, but only to Medford campus graduate students paid by Tufts to work as TA's, RA's and graders. This is a diverse group, certainly, but one that shares several employee concerns."
This is remarkable, for it only adds the mixed signals that UAW/ASET representatives are sending on this issue. Carl Martin, in the Dec. 4th Daily, forcefully claims, "...There will be absolutely no leaving any graduate students (particularly those in smaller programs, or Master's candidates) behind; a union encompasses all who are employed by Tufts" [emphasis mine].
Unfortunately, as with their campaign at Brown, the UAW filed briefs with the NLRB in February to gerrymander the bargaining unit at Tufts. If the UAW gets its way, RA's from Engineering, the Natural Sciences (including Math), Psychology, and most RA's and TA's in Nutrition will be excluded, as well as many Fletcher and MA student workers. Evidently, the UAW itself intends to leave a large number of graduate students behind, or at the very least in a disempowered state relative to unionized students.
It would be uncharitable to hold ASET responsible for this turn of events. I believe Cabanes and Martin were sincere when they spoke on this subject. But it is ominous that, already, even before the unionization vote has been held, the UAW appears to have more control over the unionization campaign than grad students themselves.
Cabanes might well respond, "Does this not address the concern highlighted by the WHUT email, that the diverse group of graduate students can't possibly be served by a union?" Quite the contrary. Considering the profound impact of a union on graduate education, it is troubling that so many would be left out of voting on the issue. As planned, the union would distort the needs of graduate students in favor of those granted union membership and voting privileges.
But all graduate students will be impacted by a union's presence. A pay raise benefiting drama graduate students could mean needed lab equipment for science students won't be purchased, English would have to cut back available tenure-track positions, tuition could spike, or the long-awaited Asian American studies department may have to wait even longer for full-time faculty. Because the funds available to Tufts as a non-profit organization are finite, some graduate programs will likely suffer to satisfy union demands, which too easily overlook vital educational values beyond the strictly financial. This is precisely the trouble with recognizing the diverse needs of individual departments and students to which the WHUT email alludes. Students in different departments have unique needs that labor union bureaucracy and favoritism will only frustrate.
Cabanes grants that policies about working conditions, pay, and so forth are made by individual departments, not the administration. Unionization would therefore seem a counter-intuitive solution to essentially intra-departmental issues. However, Cabanes observes, "the administration determines how much each department gets."
However, can Tufts pay departments more money? What does the administration fund beyond what it already gives to the departments? Only a handful of possibilities come to mind: maintenance, security, staffing, scholarship funding. Surely ASET doesn't believe that any of these are over-funded, or that tuition is too low. But since ASET either cannot or will not reveal its own funding priorities, graduate students would be taking a leap of faith in the UAW by voting for unionization.
No one disputes that pay and benefits should be improved. But it does not follow that unionization is the best means of doing so. Departments currently have the most say in determining funding for graduate students (and in requesting more money toward that end), so departments are the logical place to begin. Some issues are relevant to all graduate students, but these are already admirably addressed by the GSC. This brings me to the MA health service fee issue.
Cabanes rightly observes that rolling this fee into tuition remission for PhD students alone was not enough. Nevertheless, despite being "dependent on administration benevolence," somehow the GSC accomplished this much without the help of UAW bureaucracy, and made significant progress toward including MA students. This changed when ASET filed for unionization in December. At that point, federal labor law prohibited the University from altering the status of the health care fee, or any other aspect of pay or working conditions. To do so when a union vote is pending would be an "unfair labor practice."
If students approve unionization, this issue won't be settled until the labor negotiations are complete, which could take as long as seven years. As well intentioned as unionizers might have been, ASET's unionization drive is a blunt, rusty ax when the GSC's scalpel was sufficient and effective with a proven record. Best of all, the GSC represents all graduate students, and according to former GSC President Wilson, already has a good faith relationship with the administration. Why jeopardize what we have when the benefits of the UAW are murky at best?
It is my hope that issues like these can be further discussed and debated by members of WHUT and ASET in the near future. Hopefully, Viewpoints like Cabanes's, Jason Epstein's, Donna Wilson's, and others, will form the groundwork for the campus dialogue that I believe both sides desire as the election nears.
Jason Walker studies philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and is a member of WHUT.