15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut
#7 "The Furloughs in our Future"

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

posted under , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism

[The next in our series on higher education, 15 Ways to Take Your Furlough/Voluntary Pay Cut, features the reflections of five members of the Graduate Employee’s Organization (GEO)]

Written by Melinda Bernardo (Research Assistant and Ph.D. Student, Anthropology); Peter Odell Campbell (Teaching Assistant and Ph.D. Student, Communication); Christina Ceisel (Teaching Assistant and Ph.D. Student, Institute of Communications Research); Brian Dolber (Teaching Assistant and Ph.D. Student, Communication), and Natalie Uhl (Research Assistant and Ph.D. Student, Anthropology).

If anything positive is happening as a result of the current economic situation in the state of Illinois, it is an unprecedented level of activism and solidarity on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois. Faculty have responded to the announcement of furloughs with teach-ins and planned rallies. Some faculty, especially those in the Campus Faculty Association (CFA) see collective bargaining through a recognized union as the logical outcome of this activism–but this is not an uncontroversial position. We want to use our contribution to Kritik to call for faculty unionization as the primary response to the University administration’s unacceptable policy approaches to the budget crisis.

It is hard to think about faculty being furloughed because, as Dianne Harris wrote in an earlier post in this series, we who engage in academics often find it difficult to conceptualize ourselves as laborers—as workers who bring a "lunch pail" to work every day. The announcement of furloughs is thus an opportunity to call attention to the work of academia as labor: not only to reveal the nature of our work as academics to others, but also to make it visible to ourselves. Paradoxically, the administration’s decision to enact a furlough policy that includes faculty might be a step toward making faculty unionization conceivable.

The problem is that, as academics, it isn’t just difficult to think of ourselves as laborers, but also that doing so can seem detrimental to the unique nature of our work. Furloughs and unionization share a common assumption: that the intellectual life to which we are devoted can be segmented into hourly wage labor and defined as just another component of capitalist production in the United States. If faculty come together for the purpose of collective bargaining with the University, then teaching, research, advising, mentoring–the life of the mind in which academics invest– will be, in the view of some, defined and constrained by a contract.

As graduate students who are also employees and members of a large local in the Illinois Federation of Teachers – the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), AFT/IFT Local 6300, AFL-CIO – we face similar conceptual difficulties. Like faculty, it is hard to define when we are working and not, or to fit our labor into the space of an hourly work week. Unlike faculty, we simultaneously occupy two positions within the University: we are both students and workers. While it is often useful and necessary for the GEO to insist on drawing a bright line between these two roles, in practice, it is hard to see where this line really exists.

Take the tuition waivers that most graduate students rely on to make their years of education affordable. Tuition waivers enable us to perform our work as graduate employees. But a tuition waiver is only a necessary condition of our employment because of our simultaneous status as students (on this point see Harriet Murav's recent post). It is easier to think of graduate student unionization as appropriate if our employee and student status is separate, but in reality, our status as students is contingent on our status as workers, and vice-versa.

In our capacity as students, it is tempting to think of ourselves as apprentices – as young trainees being groomed for the life of the mind. The reality is that as soon as we arrive on campus, our status as employees puts the lie to this ideal. As teaching assistants, we function as cheap, efficient labor for the teaching and training of undergraduates, while as graduate assistants, we aid in the administrative functioning of the University. Our student and employee identities are inextricably connected–a reality that is also apparent in the dialogic relationship between our teaching and our research. As employees, we are subject to predictable attempts at exploitation and overwork by our employer.

Another bitter pill to swallow for faculty considering collective bargaining is the current lack of any real place in the shared governance of the University. If furloughs provide the impetus for faculty to unionize, this will mean that faculty—like graduate employees, staff, and service employees—are workers in the neoliberal university. The decision to unionize may require coming to grips with the reality of the faculty’s near total disenfranchisement from actual policymaking decisions at UIUC.

What we’ve learned through our activism in the GEO, and especially through our participation in the GEO's recent contract negotiation and strike, may seem like an irony or paradox. Collective bargaining–in requiring us to embrace our status as workers in the neoliberal model of the University – also grants us power to resist this very model. Faculty at UIUC must make the same decision. The only way to direct University policy away from privatization and corporatization is to recognize that they, like us, function in the current paradigm as workers in a factory or corporation.

Illinois faculty are framed as much as many kinds of workers in the University today. But unlike graduate employees and other unionized workers on campus, faculty do not yet have the power of collective bargaining. If faculty were to join graduate employees, academic professionals, and service workers in a collective of recognized unions at the University of Illinois, they would make a significant contribution to the effort to recover the University’s commitment to providing access to affordable high-quality education regardless of socioeconomic status, race, and ethnic background. They would also strengthen the University’s commitment to the research mission.

Despite lacking any real participation in the governance of the University, faculty still occupy a position of relative power and privilege. With this position comes significant responsibility–not only to resist furloughs, larger classes, and the diminution of research support in the here and now, but to resist these harmful tendencies also in, and for, the future.

As graduate students, we see the erosion of the University’s commitment to education and knowledge and the simultaneous preoccupation with production and profit. Ours is an urgent call: if furloughs can shine a light on the University as a factory churning out “instructional units,” then faculty must consider unionization as an urgent means of resistance and change.
 Read more

Learning from Our Students: the GEO Strike as Call for Faculty Solidarity

Monday, November 30, 2009

posted under , , by Unit for Criticism

GEO members at the University of Illinois march down the quad.

Written by Feisal Mohamed (English)

I am a reluctant veteran of two teaching-assistant strikes: one in 2000 as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, and one as a faculty member in 2009 at the University of Illinois. The two are closely parallel in several respects: both took aim at free-spending administrations who cry broke when it comes time to pay graduate employees a living wage, both took place against a backdrop of government divestment from higher education and ballooning tuition costs, and both set themselves against the corporatization of the university.

The Toronto strike went badly by any measure. Buoyed by a relatively quick and favorable settlement with the university’s service workers, by the success of a TA work stoppage at York University across town—which had secured an hourly wage roughly twenty percent greater than ours—and with the inexhaustible strike fund of the Canadian Union of Public Employees behind us, we thought that we had a strong hand to play. In what felt like an especially cold Toronto January we walked our picket lines with strong numbers, anticipating a breakthrough inevitably to come. One morning we were warmed by a letter of support from an alumna excoriating the university administration for inadequately funding graduate studies while financing with alumni dollars one building project after the next, and which closed, ‘Yours in shock, horror, and dismay, Margaret Atwood’ (we were warmed, though we also lamented that we could no longer ridicule the melodramatics of Atwood’s prose with a clear conscience).

After two weeks, the university indicated that it would ‘restructure’ courses in a way that did not include teaching assistants should the strike continue into February, essentially dismissing us for the remainder of the term. As it unveiled that plan, it also made a bargaining offer inferior to the one that prompted the strike and threatened to decertify the union. Exacting revenge for a protest that proved personally embarrassing for President Paul Pritchard, the university threatened the academic expulsion of three prominent union members. In this climate of intimidation and union busting, and on the eve of the university’s restructuring deadline, a divided membership reluctantly and angrily accepted an offer much the same as the one on the table at the beginning of our work stoppage. As a condition of the settlement, the union dropped grievances related to sixty-two teaching assistants whose jobs were eliminated for the term by a preliminary wave of restructuring.

The tense negotiations between the University of Illinois and the GEO thus awoke for me some painful memories and a good deal of anxiety. I feared that a university already claiming financial distress, already freezing wages and threatening furloughs, would engage in all the dirty tactics of my alma mater, and that the experience would be as dispiriting for graduate students here as it was for me. And then—Behold a wonder!—the university actually bargained with the union. It made some concessions on wages. And on parental leave. And on ‘payment-in-kind,’ and furloughs, and benefits. And after a day-long festival that here goes by the name of ‘strike,’ the university agreed that the union should be able to file grievances on any changes to tuition waivers. One would still wish to see wages that truly reflect the cost of living, and to see the university recognize that the human right to health care does not take summers off, but no round of bargaining works miracles. The GEO rightly declared on its website that it had achieved a ‘major victory for labor’ in Illinois, and for graduate employees’ unions nationwide.

But that major victory for labor is also a symptom of a larger problem in significant ways. Toronto’s recalcitrance and bullying are the tactics of a medieval guild disciplining unruly apprentices. Illinois administrators seem more inclined to treat graduate employees like employees, and are conscious of the need to secure the most qualified applicants in a competitive marketplace. These facts produced better administrative behavior and more satisfying results in this particular strike; they also reflect a deeply engrained corporate logic that aims to maximize the teaching hours of those workers with the lowest pay, in what Marc Bousquet has called the ‘radically multitiered workforce’ of the current university. Ossification of those tiers replaces the inequity of apprenticeship with the inequity of terminal low-wage labor, where graduate students cannot expect employment after graduation and non-tenure-track faculty cannot expect promotion or job security.

If, as we all seem to agree, such stratification among the teaching ranks is unjust, those tenure stream faculty who enjoy the greatest share of its security should feel the deepest moral pressure to effect change. That moral pressure has not yet turned into solidarity, despite the solidarity of other campus groups: graduate students have organized, adjunct faculty in the Chicago area have recently organized, and, as Bousquet observes, perhaps the most organized group of all are university administrators, who have become a ‘tightly knit’ ‘managerial caste.’ Tenured and tenurable faculty, by contrast, have by and large become cringing middle managers hiding under their desks and hoping that their modest and precarious perquisites are not taken away—or accepting the demise of the professorate in the way of Frank Donoghue.

We should see such a situation for what it is: when we who enjoy the (relatively) ambrosial air of the tenure stream urge those with insecure futures to fight, we are contributing to a climate of exploitation, not remedying it. The Toronto lesson is that a graduate employee union can be extremely vulnerable when exposed to an unethical administration. If faculty respond aright to the inspiring efforts of the GEO, it will be by strengthening their own organizations so that they can play a leading role in making higher education affordable once more, in assuring that neoliberal principles do not govern curricular decision-making, and in reversing the downsizing of the highest paid group of teaching professionals—who, at the end of the day, are not paid so very much. Indeed, the coming years will likely make such organization a necessity for faculty, for everywhere can be heard the grinding of budgetary axes.

Organizing may bring its own discomforts. Reviewing Bousquet’s How the University Works, Jeffrey J. Williams observes that faculty organization requires more forthright recognition of faculty as laborers, which recognition may place greater emphasis on teaching. This country’s Research 1 professorate might not enjoy as much time to churn out publications as it has done in the past fifty years, coming to resemble its counterparts in Canada and the UK. So much the better, if such an eventuality reduces the amount of slapdash scholarship that now finds its way into print. If there is truth in our teaching philosophy statements—a protasis about which I am profoundly uncertain—we should be willing to learn from the smart and successful efforts of our students. Solidarity in the tenure stream, and only solidarity in the tenure stream, can make real gains in improving quality of life in the profession as a whole.
 Read more

Statement from the GEO

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

posted under by Unit for Criticism

The GEO’s last two rallies before the strike will be this Thursday at locations in Springfield and the Urbana campus. The first rally will be the Board of Trustees meeting in Springfield. The Board of Trustees ultimately signs off on the GEO contract, and they have new members (since the clout scandal resignations) who may be swayed to put pressure on the University’s administration. The GEO will be joined by union members from the Springfield campus and other allied groups. The GEO encourages supporters to attend and has arranged transportation for the event. Email botrally@gmail.com if you’re interested. More details will be forwarded to you.

Coincident with the Board of Trustees meeting, there will be a UIUC campus rally at 12pm on the quad near the Illini Union. If you can’t make it to Springfield, this is a perfect opportunity for you to show your support for the GEO.

Contrary to misleading statements made in the email sent out by the Office of the Provost, the University of Illinois administration wants graduate employees to accept furloughs, payment-in-kind, and un-secured tuition waivers in their contract. Those issues are what the impending GEO strike is about.

Please become a Facebook fan of the GEO by going to www.uigeo.org. Read more

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
top

total visits to date | come back again

© Kritik - Adapted from code by Jack Book and Dezinerfolio