Graduate student Teaching Assistants (TAs) and Research Assistants (RAs) filed into Dowling Hall yesterday and Tuesday to vote on the creation of an employee union chapter at Tufts. The polls are officially closed but the results will not be released for several weeks.
Only current TAs and RAs were eligible to vote, as decided by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in February. If the vote is in favor of unionization, the University will be required to negotiate grad student employee salaries with the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW).
Graduate students hoping to form a union may have to wait months to see how many of the students voted for the union, or if the votes will be counted at all, pending the outcome of the University's appeal to NLRB on its decision to the approve the union. Brown University and Columbia University have also appealed similar NLRB decisions regarding their graduate students. Tufts and Brown - where eight months has passed since the appeal was made - would join a group of mainly larger, public schools across the nation whose grad students have unionized. President Larry Bacow has publicly spoken out against unionization because he believes it would run contrary to the interests of the Tufts community. "I believe it would be a mistake for graduate students to unionize," he wrote on the Tufts website. "The relationship between faculty member to graduate student is not one of employer to employee."
The vote could change considerably the relationship between grad students and the administration, and the president has said that he was not given a chance to address grad students concerns before the union struggle began.
Should the union vote fail, it cannot be brought to a vote again for two years. Should it pass, all grad students would have to pay union fees.
The labor union UAW is part of the larger National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Following the NLRB's decision to identify Tufts TAs and RAs as employees, the Association of Student Employees at Tufts (ASET) has campaigned heavily for unionization. A group called Why Have a Union at Tufts (WHUT) formed to counter its arguments.
ASET/UAW member James McCrea called the administration's stance "hypocritical" by encouraging students to vote, but also appealing the ability to unionize. Members of WHUT - including TAs and RAs - sat outside Dowling during the voting and provided pizza for all voters, regardless of their position. "We're here to get people out to vote and to talk [about the issues]," WHUT member and chemistry TA Brian Comeau said.
Despite insisting they simply wanted to open up dialogue, members of WHUT made their position clear. "The bottom line is we don't believe the benefits [of unionizing] justify the costs," Comeau said.
McCreas said WHUT was not likely to succeed. "I think the general sense is that the Union has been carried," he said." Our challenge is to be a strong and representative group and that's a challenge we will welcome."
ASET/UAW member Sunil Swaroop said the campaign had served to "create a sense of community among graduate students and bring people of various disciplines together in this stance of solidarity, which is ultimately what the union is about." But talking about unionization was the last thing on most voters' agendas. Many said they wanted to vote and move past the issue because they were tired of being harassed by both sides. One voter said she was just glad it was all over, and another said he had received an average of seven to eight election-related e-mails a day for the last week.
Voters were also upset by the voter eligibility limitations, which allowed TAs and RAs who will not be at Tufts next year to participate, while excluding next year's TAs and RAs.
Some disapprove of the guideline that only a majority of voters are needed for unionization - if only five people voted, for example, three would be sufficient for approval. WHUT member and chemistry TA Kathleen Meyers said the needs of all the departments differ so greatly that it is hard to "lump them all together," but that unionization would do just that. The University would have to "collectively bargain" with the union for all graduate student employees' salaries and benefits at once, whereas the administration currently deals with each department separately.
WHUT members said unionization is not applicable to a university setting because a TA or RA position is not a student's profession, unlike the positions held by University employees such as OneSource workers. Furthermore, WHUT says a union would put the undergraduate student body at a disadvantage, as it would give TAs and RAs license to strike.
