UW Grad Students Seek Union Recognition

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney (in white shirt and dark jacket) pledged union support for UW graduate student employees who are taking a strike vote this week.

The Graduate Student Employee Action Coalition (GSEAC) represents teaching assistants, readers and tutors on campus. Results of the vote will be announced November 4 on whether their union may stage a walkout to gain recognition from the UW administration.

The university administration has so far declined to recognize GSEAC. "We are not convinced that union representation for graduate-student assistants is consistent with a positive learning environment at the University," said UW President Richard McCormick in a recent statement to The Daily, the UW student-run newspaper.

McCormick said that one of the issues in what he calls "a complex matter," is whether graduate assistants are primarily students or primarily employees.

Steven Olswang, vice provost for the UW, said that graduate students' assistantships are a form of financial aid to enable them to complete their educational goals. Union organizers disagree, citing specific issues.

"The effort to organize started two years ago when the health benefits for teaching assistants were cut by the UW administration without notification," said Paola Bellotti, graduate student and union representative for the Communications department. "The health-benefit event was just so blatant, it seemed to be natural for the graduate-student body to start the organizing effort," she explained.

A reduction of health benefits was just the catalyst to organize. "There's a range of issues across the departments," said Melissa Meade, graduate student and media spokesperson for GSEAC. "There's so many [issues] on the table right now, from lab safety in the sciences to grievance procedures... The unifying theme right now is collective bargaining, to have access to collective bargaining," she said. As it stands right now, the administration is the final authority for grievance procedures, according to Mead. "With a union you would get an arbiter, you would get somebody who would come in and help you solve it instead of having the administration have the final say," she added.

GSEAC is affiliated with the United Auto Workers (UAW). Nearly 85 percent of UW's 1,600 academic student employees have chosen GSEAC/UAW as their collective-bargaining representative.

"Collective bargaining simply made sense as a way to keep from getting exploited as cheap academic labor," said Coll-Peter Thrush, a graduate student and teaching assistant in American Indian Studies.

"Graduate students have become a safety valve for the university to cut costs. Our benefits and salaries were always at risk and we had no real recourse on an individual basis," he explained. The teaching assistants do nearly half the teaching on campus, Thrush claimed. "We get W-2 forms every January and we are recognized by our students and our faculty as workers," he said.

He said is fairly confident the strike authorization vote will be successful.

In the event of a strike, Olswang said, "It is our expectation and hope that GSEAC members will understand their professional duties for which they are receiving assistantships and meet their obligations to undergraduate students."

"A strike is disruptive," said Matt Moe, graduate student and teaching assistant in the Political Science department. "Strikes aim to draw attention to an issue and at the same time place pressure on the other party to bargain in good faith," he explained. "In the long term, graduate organizing efforts will improve the quality of undergraduate education."

"Withholding our labor is the final way for us to illustrate that we are indeed employees of the University," Thrush said, "and that we are serious about having formed a union."

Cynthia Jones is a student in the University of Washington School of Communications News Laboratory.

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