Grad students move to unionize

Graduate students looking to unionize during the coming school year will face some major hurdles. First of all, it's illegal.

Graduate student leaders would like to use collective bargaining to give students leverage in settling disputes with mentors and in negotiations over health care benefits and wages for teaching assistants. But they will first have to convince Annapolis legislators to place them on the list of state employees that can unionize legally.

Graduate Student Government President Laura Moore said she will be part of an effort to lobby the Maryland General Assembly, and that she hopes to have legislation pre-filed by next January, when the legislature's next session begins. They have already enlisted the support of state Sen. Jim Rosapepe (D-Prince George's and Anne Arundel), who follows university-related legislation closely.

However, the university has not taken a public stance on the issue and graduate school Dean Charles Caramello said he sees no reason for students to unionize. He cited a 4.5 percent increase in teaching assistant wages set for next year and said mechanisms already in place for dealing with student-mentor conflicts are sufficient.

"We all want to achieve the same ends," Caramello said: "excellence."

Assistant university President Ann Wylie said the school will not be taking an official stance on graduate students unionizing until legislation to allow it has been introduced in the state assembly.

Moore dismissed the graduate school's stance as "lip service" and said if graduate students want to see change, they will have to fight for it themselves. She said that many students have seen their tuition and rent rise more than the proposed wage increase and said the university has done little to prevent faculty members and advisers from taking advantage of them.

"We really don't think we're moving foward," she said. "We're moving backward a bit."

Hellmut Lotz, a government and politics graduate student familiar with the issue, said he supports the drive to unionize because he says many of his fellow graduate students are losing most of their wages to housing costs. "When you work at McDonald's, you have a contract and you can take it or leave it, but with a union, you can negotiate," said Lotz. "[Graduate students] generate hundreds of thousands of dollars for the university and get paid peanuts."

Moore said she also hopes unionizing will give students a better avenue for settling disputes with mentors. She said students are often taken advantage of by hostile professors, giving one example of a student who claimed a faculty member had derailed her graduation by burying her with extra work.

Another graduate student, who wished to remain anonymous because she feared retaliation from her mentor, said she had been forced to pay out-of-pocket expenses for conferences that were mandatory, a practice Moore said could be resisted through collective bargaining.

Caramello said students can already go higher up the chain of command to have problems with their mentors addressed, but Lisa Pfeifer, special adviser to Moore, said that process is not working.

"There are people who have contacted the GSG and have gone through the chain of command and [their problems] still weren't resolved." said Pfeifer. "It's possible that if grad students were unionized, the balance of power might shift."