Pay inequity at Tufts: a TA's testimony

Consider this a Tufts TA's testimony as to why labor unions make sense.

Last semester, I was offered a grader position in one Tufts department, and a teaching assistant position in another. In case the difference in positions is not clear, there is not much of a difference: I attended lectures and graded for both, but led sections twice a week as a TA (for a total of about three extra hours a week) including out-of-class interaction with students. The problem, as it turned out, was less the pay than the pay inequity. By the end of the semester, I had worked a comparable number of hours in the two courses -- but one department paid me $4,000 while the other paid me less than half -- $1,800.

Could I have just personally raised this discrepancy with the two departments? Sure, but the answer would probably have been that the one department for which I graded has a more limited budget, and hence cannot afford to pay more. The fundamental problem here is not that one department has less money than another. The problem is that, unlike other universities, Tufts fails to coordinate course funding across departments to ensure that TAs and graders get paid equally no matter the department. Instead, according to officials in the Tufts finance and human resource offices, departments pay according to what they deem appropriate given their budget, so TAs and graders get paid differently depending on the department.

"Free" market conservatives may claim that departments and their TAs get the money they deserve, but who is to decide why one TA will get paid more than another for doing the same amount of work at the same type of job? Furthermore, students pay the same tuition regardless of what department their course is in, so shouldn't their TAs accordingly be paid equally?

There is no lack of schools across the nation that uphold pay equity. For instance, the University of Wisconsin, for which I worked as a TA several years ago, has a university-wide policy which ensures that all TAs are paid equally, adjusted for workload and experience.

Can't Tufts administration resolve such pay inequity without a union of graduate student employees, you ask? Well, they have not yet, so what gives any of us the sense that they will now, without organized pressure? It is a truism in life that nothing changes without effort, and in politics nothing changes without pressure.

Couldn't I have just asked the professor who hired me to do more of the work? If only employee-employer relations were so simple! Like most employers, professors who employ graduate students have a lot of power, no matter how sympathetic they may be. Employing professors not only hold the keys to the jobs they offer, they often write recommendations and can put in good or bad words for graduate students seeking future work inside or beyond the university. Under these conditions, it is in the graduate employee's interest not to do anything that might irritate the professor, including raising problems of pay or overwork.

This is not to deny the often amicable working relations between professors and their graduate employees. It is in part precisely because of these amicable relations that graduate employees (including yours truly) often do not feel comfortable raising work and pay issues personally with faculty. This is one of the reasons why unions make sense. Unions are designed to bargain publicly for all graduate employees on those touchy issues we often find so difficult to broach privately, given professor-student power dynamics -- not to mention the often limited power professors have to raise pay or lighten workloads. Power is more likely to be abused behind closed doors. Unions open the doors to power, allowing workers to help determine the work conditions that affect their lives. Isn't that the spirit of democratic self-government?

This semester, I am a TA for two courses. For each course, I am paid $2,500 out of a larger grant separate from any department budget. My employing professor estimated that that would amount to about $15 per hour of work. That is not too shabby if I worked full time. At 40 hours per week, 48 weeks per year, that equals $28,800.

However, TAs are mostly students, and students are expected to complete their degrees in a timely fashion. In order to advance toward degrees, most TAs do not work full-time, so our reality cannot be compared with that of a full-time worker. In reality, my TA pay this academic year totals $10,600 gross, and about $9,000 net after taxes. Interestingly, that is about the poverty line for a single person: $8,980 in 2003, according to the federal government. And that $8,980 is unadjusted for the higher cost of living in the Boston area. Ever so ironically, some faculty members respond that such poverty-level income is all the more reason to finish graduate school quickly. Yet how can we finish our degrees quickly when we have to work to live, and work more because we are paid less?

This is why I also work as a waiter for a catering company, to supplement my otherwise inadequate income as a Tufts TA. As a waiter -- a job which requires relatively little skill or knowledge -- I make $20 an hour plus occasional yet handsome tips, as compared to the $15 or so I am paid as your TA -- a job which requires substantially more knowledge and skill to teach and evaluate your work as undergraduates.

These are some of the reasons why I look forward to the day when Tufts' administration recognizes ASET, its union of graduate student employees.



Paul Lachelier is a teaching assistant in the Sociology Department and a member of the Association of Student Employees at Tufts (ASET). This is the first in a series of five viewpoints by Tufts teaching assistants about their working conditions.