I am not a graduate student so I cannot claim to fully understand graduate student concerns or what the best solutions for their issues would be. With that said, of the concerns I have seen raised, forming a union seems like it could be a positive step towards having them addressed.
So what are some of these concerns?
The health plan offered to students is awful. Among the many complaints is that, with few exceptions, it ties your health service to Goddard. For those who have dealt with Goddard, it is almost always inundated with people, making the acquisition of timely appointments nearly impossible. This is something all students who use the student health plan have to deal with, but graduate students in particular are more likely to need the student health plan because their life status usually disqualifies them from the insurance of their parents that many undergraduates are able to utilize.
Graduate student are clearly prioritized behind undergraduate students at OU. I am sure this point will get some opposition from the administration, but graduate students know this to be the case and observant undergraduates will confirm this as true. Even The Oklahoma Daily is guilty of this. Every week, we get an article running down the usually uneventful minutes of the UOSA Undergraduate Student Congress, but rarely get articles about the Graduate Student Senate which hasn’t even bothered meeting yet this semester.
Finally, there are the complaints that graduate students have as employees. The pay is low for the work demanded. They have little say in the decisions of the university. The Graduate Student Senate, their advocacy body, is powerless, not to mention ineffective. They do not get as much academic discretion as they should be allowed as evinced by their complaints about grade inflation earlier this year.
The list of problems could certainly go on but the point is this: Graduate students are simultaneously relegated to the role of second-class students and second-class employees. Yet as a result of their low prioritization they do not have the requisite influence to change this.
So in comes the union.
Graduate students are very valuable to the university. Not only are they essential if the university wishes to be taken seriously, but they also provide hard-to-replace instruction to undergraduates.
The necessity of having graduate students at the university happy and working makes collective bargaining a useful way to establish influence.
The threat of a strike or even the embarrassment of the successful creation of a strong union could provide graduate students with a real voice and real influence. This would be a great improvement over the influence of the Graduate Student Senate which even when it bothers with trying to do anything useful only has the power to suggest changes. A union would have the power to demand changes and have the threat of strikes or other collective action to actually back it up.
Now some might say starting a union is dangerous. Oklahoma is after all a right-to-exploit state. But the circumstances of a university make the prospects of success much higher. First, the university cannot simply move to another city or state to avoid the union as so many companies do. Second, the work of graduate students is very highly skilled and hard to replace quickly. The seasonal nature of admissions and specificity of each course would make it hard for the university to quickly insert scabs, a tool also used by many companies. Finally, the environment of higher learning and the fact this is a public university would make it far more difficult to bust a union than other more conventional private workplaces.
Whether or not to unionize is obviously a decision to be made by individual graduate students. Instead of lamenting the problems graduate students have or deferring to the incompetent and powerless Graduate Student Senate whose leadership appears more interested in obtaining a faculty position than fighting for the interests of graduate students, I think graduate students should seriously consider the benefits unionizing can bring.
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impatient_with_ignorance 2 years, 3 months ago
Surely the most interesting thing here is the absence of a single comment after one full week. Perhaps graduate students are too busy, or perhaps they are aware of the spending cuts being mandated on every OU College and department because the disastrous state budget situation has led to mandated cuts at every state agency. It's obvious from his other articles and his advocacy within SDS that Mr. Breunig is concerned about power in some basic way, but making demands on behalf of a group to which he does not belong, or recommending tactics to such a group, is being met with the well-deserved silence that befalls unsolicited advice from an outsider with limited understanding of the group's perspective and situation.