From: nlns@igc.apc.org (New Liberation News Service)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: NLNS: GRAD STUDENT ORGANIZING HISTORY
Date: 30 Sep 92 01:25:53 GMT
Organization: The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science

/* Written  6:17 pm  Sep 29, 1992 by nlns in cdp:nlns.news */
/* ---------- "NLNS Packet 3.2 *** 9/28/92" ---------- */

Who Said It Can't Be Done?!
A History of Graduate Student Organizing and Unionization in the U.S.
Robert Ovetz, The Other Texan

(NLNS)--There is a common myth shared in many circles that 
graduate students passively accept their fate and do not organize 
themselves to defend or advance their interests.  This is a myth 
unsupported by history and the recently successful strikes at Yale 
and University of Massachusetts-Amherst over the last year and the 
activities of grad students at UT (University of Texas) since the 1970's. 
	This article first examines the various strategies used by 
graduate students and then details the history of their organizing 
attempts nationwide and at UT. We can learn from these efforts of 
graduate students to organize themselves for our own ongoing 
battles for tuition and fee waivers and a number of other needs of 
UT graduate students.

Shattering the Myth of "Professionalism"	
Since 1965, graduate students have shed the mystifying labels of 
"professionals" and "equals" among the faculty and administration 
and have begun to organize themselves.  While the best known and 
most successful cases have taken the form of union-type 
organizations, graduate students have also formed ad hoc groups, 
study committees, protest organizations and used other tactics to 
fight for more control over their working conditions, fewer work 
hours, higher wages, health benefits, early and publicly explained 
notification of appointments, and a number of other needs.
	One of the most difficult issues confronted by graduate 
students attempting to organize to protect their interests is a 
common belief that graduate student employees--e.g., teaching 
assistants (TA's), research assistants (RA's), assistant instructors 
(AI's) and instructors--are "professionals" whose jobs are an 
essential part of their academic training.  This ideal does not hold 
up to our everyday experiences, however, since these positions are 
often handed out in the form of charity or a gift by department and 
college administrators who believe they are doing us a "favor," a 
noblesse oblige.  In this way, graduate student employees are 
implicitly looked down on as patrons of administrators' good will, 
hardly a "professional" position of equality.
	In fact, behind this facade of "professionalism," graduate 
students are doing the unrecognized and underpaid work without 
which UT could not function. As UT cuts hiring for new faculty and 
reduces faculty pay raises, sabbaticals, and other necessities, more 
and more of the work once done by fully-paid faculty are being 
picked up by underpaid graduate students. This is demonstrated in 
the composition of the UT faculty over the last decade.
		Faculty	AI's & TA's
	1980	2,095	1,816
	1986	2,289	2,243
	1991	2,373	2,563
	
	In 1980, there were 279 more faculty (full, associate, and 
assistant professors, and instructors) than AI's and TA's.  However, 
by 1986, there were only 46 more faculty than AI's and TA's.  By 
1991, we surpassed the 2,373 faculty with 2,563 AI's and TA's. In 
other words, graduate students made up 70% of the growth in 
teaching staff in the last eleven years, besides teaching a 
disproportionally large number of students.
 	As the universities come to rely less and less on full-time 
faculty and more and more on part-timers, graduate students do an 
ever increasing amount of the teaching and research on campus for 
less and less pay. Meanwhile, as selective austerity channels money 
away from teaching and "education" to entrepreneurial priorities, UT 
is using low-paid, flexible workers to fill in the gap.
	We are being looked upon to do more and more of the teaching 
as instructors or discussion section leaders, counseling, advising, 
grading, and so on.  Except for the few RA's and AI's that actually get 
to teach or do research in areas immediately relevant to their own 
research, most of the work we do is far from professional or 
relevant to our academic preparation, but is rather unfulfilling and 
underpaid work.  Because of the nature of the work, it rarely is 
limited to the 20-hour assignment it is supposed to be. Some 
students do less and many do more than 20 hours--often sacrificing 
their own studies or research and taking incompletes when seminar 
papers come due at the end of the semester.  We are then punished 
for our incompletes when considered for a position. 
	In addition, the conditions under which we are employed is 
hardly professional.  Most of us have to wait until the end of the 
previous semester or even just before the semester begins to learn 
if we received a position.  Many are often left on a "waiting list" and 
do not know if they will be able to pay for tuition or even food and 
housing until the semester starts.  This is often the result of 
departments using these positions to recruit new students.  
However, what they are never told is that once they get here they 
are not guaranteed a job for even the eight to ten semesters which 
is the maximum number of semesters of employment opportunity.  
(The number is normally dependent on the department's position on 
UT's ladder of priority, e.g., profitability.) We are treated no better 
than farmworkers who wait each morning in a hiring hall to find out 
if the labor contractor will use them.  We are treated a 
pieceworkers, hired on a semester by semester basis (although they 
claim it is per academic year), without any protection against 
arbitrary firings.  It need hardly be said that we are not paid 
professional salaries.
	Even then, the whole hiring process is kept secret from us "for 
our own protection from things we shouldn't know," as the outgoing 
Sociology chair implied to 50 sociology students at a meeting last 
semester.  The students were presenting the results of their survey 
in which an overwhelming majority supported student involvement 
in faculty committees, tuition and fee waivers, and other 
necessities.  Even though these jobs are supposedly part of the 
professional learning experience, we are kept in the dark about how 
it even works.  Meetings in which TA's are chosen are closed to 
students and the selection process has no set criteria.  Although we 
are constantly assured that there is a fair process at work, it 
remains mystified.  Meanwhile, thousands of grads cower in fear for 
what they say and do, afraid that they may not get to eat next 
semester.
	Although this appears to be an almost insurmountable 
predicament, since the mid 1960's, thousands of graduate students 
have come to the conclusion that this situation needs to be 
confronted and changed.  By seeing themselves as workers for the 
university, they have attempted to do something to not only gain 
recognition for what they do, but also to reduce the amount of work 
they do while getting paid more for it.  These are only fair demands 
considering that graduate students are doing the work of fully-paid 
professors at a fraction of their actual wages.  Even worse, during 
the summer, graduate students receive only their monthly pay for 
teaching a whole semester in six weeks while faculty pay is pro-
rated accordingly.

What Can We Do for Ourselves?	
At this moment, a major effort is underway to unionize UT graduate 
students around higher wages, tuition/fee waivers and other needs.  
In the process, there are a number of questions to be asked about 
how we want to organize.  Should we form a union, or are there other 
ways to go about it?  Do we only include graduate students who are 
actually employed and receiving a salary?  Do we limit ourselves to 
issues of wages and benefits or do we take up the broader issues of 
the university's priorities and how it is run?
	Forming a union is far from problem-free.  One of the 
difficulties that has come up time and time again--although they are 
insurmountable only on occasion--is that organizing a union requires 
following certain rules and guidelines set out by the National Labor 
Relations Act that originated in the 1930's.  First, in order to be 
recognized as a union it is necessary to sign up 50%+1 of the TA's 
and AI's, or TA's, RA's, and AI's, depending on which employees want 
to be included in the union.  After we get 50%+1, we have to request 
either voluntary recognition of our union by UT as the representative 
of all graduate employees in order to begin negotiating, or we could 
go to the state's labor relations board and request that we be 
recognized and an election be held.  We could try either method, 
although both could take a long time to be settled as we wait out 
hearings and appeals by UT if we win, as the unions at the University 
of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and San Diego 
are currently doing. 
	If we made it to the election and won we would open 
negotiations with UT which could also drag on.  However, we can 
easily set a date at which time if there is no collective settlement 
we could strike, which could also last a long time. Although strikes 
by state employees in Texas are illegal, that does not mean we will 
automatically lose as some claim.  In fact, the 1975 Michigan strike 
was illegal but they could not be broken because of their widespread 
support from undergraduates, faculty and the Teamster delivery 
drivers.  The only reason it is still illegal for us to strike in Texas 
is because we have not had the power to challenge the law yet.  For 
example, the only reason the National Labor Relations Board included 
universities after 1970 was because there were enough faculty and 
grads striking that it forced the board to do something to try to 
control it.
	But before we even petition for recognition as a bargaining 
agent we should be aware about how graduate employees have been 
defined.  In nearly every organizing attempt described in this article 
over the last twenty years, graduate students have had to challenge 
the legal definition of graduate employee as being dependent on one's 
status as a student and thus not an employee.  Although graduate 
students have often been successful in challenging this definition by 
showing that most work by TA's, AI's and RA's is not directly related 
to their education, universities have used this time and time again 
to gum up the process.  This is the very problem faced by UC unions 
who have had their original favorable decision from the state labor 
relations board overturned, and then lost on appeal this past June.
	It becomes apparent why the myth that TA's, AI's, and RAs are 
"professionals-in-training" is so predominant.  The flipside of this 
myth is a legal technicality that is used against us in court if we 
form a union.  There is clearly a symbiotic relationship between the 
ruling ideology and the law.
	This myth about grad students is equally dependent on the 
mystification of students in general.  Students are not seen as 
workers because they are not paid an overt wage for what they do 
even though students spend most of their time learning to be 
workers and, in fact, their future work is only possible because of 
the work they do as students.  This mystification of students is 
being used against graduate students in our attempts to organize.  
Although one would think graduate student employees are workers 
because they work and receive a wage, the university and the law 
would ignore this fact and revert to defining graduate employees as 
primarily students, and because students are not workers, graduate 
students cannot be workers.
	Unions have failed to deal with this myth and have often won 
in the courts by showing the opposite--that graduate employees do 
work "unrelated" to their education and role as students.  Because 
their legal defense agrees that students are not working, they 
reinforce the very myth used to deny them the right to organize: 
because they are students they are not workers.  In effect, by 
agreeing with the logic of the law they never challenge the very 
basis that has repeatedly been used against us.
	Another question that is raised is whether we only organize 
graduate employees or all graduate students.  Since the law already 
uses the unwaged status of students to say we are not workers 
because we are primarily students, we should not limit ourselves 
only to waged graduate students.  The fact is that graduate students 
who do not get a job are still doing the unwaged work of maintaining 
themselves for the next semester in case they do get hired.  If we 
ignore the concerns of unwaged grads--the need for more flexible 
grant-based rather than loan-based financial aid--the university 
could merely replace union members with starving grads of which 
there are more than enough in some departments.   In other words, 
we need to make the connection between the needs of employees and 
non-employees or else it could be used against us.
	Last but not least we need to decide if we are simply trying to 
improve our standard of living, or trying to transform the university 
itself.  The issues of wages and benefits do not exist in a vacuum 
but are organized by the priorities of the university. Academic 
programs resistant or not immediately related to commercialization 
often have lower salaries, fewer positions, and more women and 
minorities enrolled.  Our wages and benefits cannot be separated 
from the entrepreneurial organization of UT.  As a result, students 
and faculty in unprofitable academic programs as well as 
international students, women, gay, lesbian and bisexual, Latino, 
black, and many ethnic students and faculty are already at a 
disadvantage and hardest hit by cutbacks.  We need to be able to 
relate our needs to the needs of many groups not because it is 
"politically correct," but because we need to develop alliances and 
friends who can work together to achieve our goals.  The more 
friends we have the more likely we are to get what we desire. 
	Too often grad unions have limited themselves to issues of 
wages and have either failed because they could not organize support 
or gave up once they were tossed a few crumbs.  Even if we won 
higher wages and waivers, certain commercially-oriented 
departments and colleges would still be paying their grads more.  
And even if we had higher wages, that would not help those minority 
grads who are denied TA positions by their departments and, for 
example, sent to the Center for Mexican American Studies, which is 
expected to shoulder supporting most of the Mexican-American 
graduate students in the College of Liberal Arts.  It would also not 
change the situation of women who are being sexually harassed by 
students and faculty, or researchers whose ideas are turned into 
profitable new products by their advisors without the researchers' 
approval .  We need to change the way the university is organized and 
whose needs it serves.
	Needless to say, forming a union is not the only way to 
organize.  Signing a membership card is not organizing around 
meaningful issues that concern us in our everyday lives.  Unions are 
not a substitute for organizing.  Signing a card will never get us 
what we want.  The union cannot do anything for us--we have to do 
it ourselves.  And, no matter what we do, it doesn't really matter 
what we call ourselves. 
	However, this does not mean we cannot do both.  While 
organizing ourselves for tuition/fee waivers, childcare, extended 
aid, higher pay, etc., we can also ask people to commit to taking 
action to realize these goals by formally joining an organization.  We 
could form our own unaffiliated union first, and after taking 
whatever action necessary to win our needs, then carefully select a 
union to affiliate with, which was the strategy used by the Graduate 
Employees Organization at Michigan and UMass.  They initially 
formed their own independent union, and then chose from among a 
number of unions including the Communication Workers of America 
(CWA). However, as an independent it will be difficult for us to 
afford the legal costs of gaining recognition.
	Those involved in the recently begun effort to form a union 
have been discussing these issues.  Although about 150 graduate 
students have become members of the CWA-affiliated Texas State 
Employees Union (TSEU), we should fully inform ourselves about the 
history of this union, its relationship with CWA, and the way it is 
organized and organizes before we commit ourselves to it. There is 
much more to organizing a union than just "signing people up" as 
TSEU organizer Travis Donoho told students at a GPA meeting.	
	CWA is expanding beyond the communications industry as AT&T 
and the Bell companies increase automation, reducing the union's 
membership and dues.  The recent Austin CableVision strike in 
Austin was less about wages or working conditions than Time 
Warner's (which owns Austin CableVision and other cable companies) 
retribution against CWA for supporting AT&T in its attempts to 
receive Congressional authority to expand into the information 
industry, in which Time Warner is active. Paradoxically, CWA is 
working with AT&T (which is attempting to undermine organized 
employees with automation) so that AT&T can get new business and 
hire more potential dues-paying union members. 
	Other graduate student unions carefully researched each union 
before affiliating.  Although it is true that we could switch later, 
there is no need to decide so soon.  We could sign up members for our 
own union while deciding with whom to affiliate.  Making a well-
informed decision could be an early boost to our efforts. Yale grads 
received $100,000 from its union to organize.  The amount of 
support a union offers us can demonstrate whether they take us 
seriously in our desire to improve our lives or whether they want 
more dues-paying paper members.
	Another option is to organize in whatever fashion is needed 
according to the particular conditions faced, and when those 
conditions change, organize another way to serve our changed needs.  
It is possible to strike or take disruptive action without having to 
go through the legal bureaucracy at all.  If we are well-organized 
and have the power, UT will have no other choice but to give us what 
we want.  This is true of whether we form a union or not.  Unions are 
only one option of many, yet it is an option many grads have used 
with success.  We do not have to form a union but we do need to 
organize.

Don't Do Us Any Favors: Graduate Student Organizing in the 1960's  
and 1970's
	
In the 1960's and early 1970's, graduate students began to organize 
around these issues in the midst of widespread student activism 
around the Vietnam war, military research, racism, sexism, grades, 
the draft, and other issues of social justice.  In 1965, the very first 
graduate student employee union was formed at the University of 
California-Berkeley and went on strike for a week in the midst of 
the Free Speech Movement.   After affiliating with the American 
Federation of Teachers they fought off attempts by departments and 
the state legislature to fire and de-fund their jobs.  Although the 
union eventually confined itself to issues of wages and benefits, and 
organized around department concerns, members were heavily 
involved with other social justice movements.  The union was never 
formally recognized although it did sign an agreement with the 
university to negotiate over a number of issues.
	Graduate students quickly began to organize on a number of 
other campuses in the 1960's.  A union at the City University of New 
York won the right to bargain collectively in 1968 and won a 
substantial pay raise.  TA's also formed union or union-like 
organizations in Illinois and at the University of Oklahoma, UCLA, 
Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Stanford.  The Graduate 
Federation at the University of Colorado won recognition soon after 
they threatened to strike in the spring of 1970.  In the same year, 
staff and TA's at San Francisco State College signed a collective 
bargaining agreement.  They had formed the union, according to its 
president, because they were "underpaid, undervalued, overused, 
abusedIa dirt cheap, shit work employee... (and) virtually a slave 
laborer in the campus."
	In 1968, Cornell TA's and RA's also organized separate ad hoc 
groups that threatened to strike when the university granted pay 
raises only to TA's and not RA's.  RA's had refused to pay their fees 
in protest, and attempted to form a union along with TA's in 1969 at 
the same time black students had taken over the student union.
	In 1970, the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) at the 
University of Wisconsin-Madison was formed by graduate students 
who had originally met in 1966 to oppose the university giving their 
class ranks to the Selective Service.  TAA eventually struck for 25 
days in spring 1970, and, even without support from other labor 
unions and a threat by the university to call in the National Guard, 
eventually won a number of benefits including a guaranteed period 
and level of support, health care, grievance procedure, and maximum 
class sizes, although they failed to win a say over the educational 
form and content of the courses they taught, which was a popular 
demand.  Although these demands were won after the strike was 
called off, TAA won the support of many undergraduates.  The strike 
took place about a year after black students had gone on strike as 
well.
	TAA's success at UW-Madison influenced about 50-60 other 
organizing efforts on campuses across the US.  To name only two 
cases, Harvard students struck for a day to protest the planned 
elimination of the tuition rebate, and Adelphi grads petitioned the 
National Labor Relations Board for inclusion into the faculty union in 
1972. 
	Although many of the strikes and organizing that took place 
during the 1960's were focused around broader issues of social 
justice as well as austerity, during the 1970's, graduate students 
began to organize in response to the disinvestment from higher 
education that was being deployed to restore control over the 
insurgent campuses.  Then as today, grads organized to block tuition 
and fee increases, cutbacks, and wage cuts while demanding waivers 
and pay increases.  Yet, TAA's success provided a model for graduate 
students that flared into an organizing effort at the University of 
Michigan, continuing to this day.
	Following a student strike against tuition increases and staff 
organizing in 1973, graduate students at Michigan responded to the 
policy of charging non-resident grad employees out-of-state tuition 
for the first time by forming a new organization called the 
Organization of Teaching Fellows (OTF).  Although various 
departmental organizations had been formed in the past, OTF 
signaled a concerted effort to organize university-wide.  Although 
the university eventually set aside $2 million of the tuition increase 
to cover the increase in grad tuition, OTF accepted the money but 
agreed with undergraduates that they were being pitted against each 
other by using undergraduate tuition increases to supplement grads. 
	In 1973, OTF became the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) 
and demanded recognition from the university.  When this was 
refused, GEO eventually won a state-sanctioned election and struck 
for 29 days in 1975, even though it was illegal under state law for 
state employees to strike, as it is in Texas. The strike received 
support from hundreds of faculty and from many undergraduates who 
boycotted classes.  When students began returning to class, 
picketers blocked the incinerator (causing a trash pileup) and trucks 
delivering supplies.  GEO was eventually successful with its 
demands and won pay raises, tuition reductions, and other benefits.  
The union did not affiliate with a larger union until after it won the 
strike, and it still exists to this day.
	At the same time grads were organizing at Michigan, students 
were doing the same at a number of other universities in Illinois, 
and at the University of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, SUNY-Buffalo and 
Stonybrook, and three Canadian universities, although SUNY-Buffalo 
and Cincinnati students did not affiliate with a larger union.  
University of Oregon-Eugene graduate students won their first 
collective bargaining agreement in 1978 with the Graduate Teaching 
Fellows Federation as their union, and even had state law changed to 
reclassify graduate employees as public employees, giving them the 
legal right to have a union. 

In Revolt Again: Graduate Organizing In the 1980's and 1990's
	
In the late 1980's, graduate organizing began to pick up again.  The 
strikes at Yale and UMass-Amherst last year were only the tip of the 
iceberg.  In all, there are active graduate student unions on at least 
16 major universities, including the University of South Florida, 
Cornell, Yale, the SUNY System, the University of Pittsburgh, 
Illinois-Champlain, Rutgers, Temple, and six University of California 
campuses.  Graduate students have fought for and won collective 
bargaining rights at the University of Michigan, University of 
Oregon-Eugene, Rutgers, University of Florida-Gainesville, and the 
University of Wisconsin.  Unions at the Universities of Minnesota and 
Pittsburgh lost certification elections, and SUNY students won 
approval last fall to hold elections.  There is also organizing around 
the need for health care (such as the University of North Texas), 
childcare, and a number of other issues at many other universities.
	These successes have come because of constant organizing and 
pressure by students at these and other schools.  University of 
California grads at Berkeley, Irvine, Davis, Santa Cruz, San Diego and 
UCLA are working as part of District 65 of the United Auto Workers 
(which is composed of mainly "service sector" workers) to win 
recognition from the state's Public Employee Relations Board so that 
they can holds representation elections and begin bargaining.  
Michigan's GEO has been fighting annually to improve their situation 
since it was formed.
	Although UC-Berkeley grads top the UT administration's list 
for having the best standard of living, it is obviously not what it 
seems because grads have been organizing there since 1987.  In the 
spring of 1989, UC-Berkeley graduate students' District 65/UAW-
affiliated Association of Graduate Student Employees (AGSE) struck 
for two days, shutting down 90 percent of the campus.  The AGSE 
was formed in 1983 during campus-wide resistance to a fee 
increase that would have resulted in a salary cut of $50.  Although 
the strikers demanded and won some of their demands for 
affirmative action in hiring graduate student employees, class size 
limits, tuition/fee waivers, and health care benefits, they were not 
as successful in circulating the struggle to other movements on 
campus against military research, multiculturalism, and the defense 
of People's Park.  However, the union is establishing contacts at UC-
Santa Cruz and UC-San Diego with other graduate students.
	The District 65/UAW-affiliated Graduate Employee 
Organization at UM-Amherst struck in Fall of 1991 for about a week, 
winning nearly all their demands for wage and benefit increases.  In 
1979, a group of graduate employees were denied a union election by 
the state after waiting two years for a decision.  However, they did 
not give up trying to achieve voluntary recognition from the 
university, which finally came in 1990 after two short strikes and a 
threat to shut down the administration building.  
	The organizing really took off at UM-Amherst in November 
1989 as students, graduate students, and faculty struck for a week 
to protest $30 million in cuts over the previous 18 months, as well 
as several tuition and fee hikes (like a proposed $350 curriculum fee 
and the elimination of over 900 course sections). GEO held a two-day 
strike, many faculty canceled classes, and the faculty union, the 
Massachusetts Society of Professors, and the Leadership Coalition 
which represents all the employee unions and student and faculty 
bodies, endorsed the strike, although some "minority" groups didn't 
because they were not included in strike planning. 
	Yale has also become a significant center of conflict.  In 1984, 
dining hall workers struck for 10 weeks.  And in February 1992, 
1300 of Yale's 2,200 graduate students went on strike.  The Graduate 
Employees and Student Organization (GESO) had been organizing 
graduate students for union recognition for a little more than a year 
before receiving majority support, receiving ideas from other 
graduate student unions at Michigan, Wisconsin, UM-Amherst and UC-
Berkeley.  Graduate students had been organizing for a while, 
forming the Teaching Assistants Solidarity in 1987 to demand 
higher wages. 
	Organizing was spurred again in 1991 by an administration 
plan to reduce the number of TA's by 20% and limit graduate 
students to six years of enrollment. Yale was attempting to 
implement cuts of five to ten percent ($10 million) that semester 
even though it had recently received $30 million endowments, 
including $10 million from the Henry Luce Foundation for an 
international research center, and has a $700 million yearly budget 
and $2.6 billion endowment (which increased from $676 million in 
1980).  Their salaries are also some of the lowest in the country.  
TA's are paid $6,000 a year for 15-hour work weeks. TA's elsewhere 
make $8,000 and up to $12,000 at UC-Berkeley.
	The strike, in which 75% of the TA's canceled or relocated 
their classes off-campus, received faculty and staff support.  
Faculty were circulating a letter of support, and the staff union, 
which had settled on a new contract with the university the morning 
the strike began, wildcatted with about 75% of the maintenance and 
cafeteria workers, and 30% of the clerical and technical workers 
striking to show support.
	The Graduate Advocacy Organization at Cornell has been 
organizing since a 1987 strike by food and maintenance workers, and 
won 10% raises two straight years. The Graduate Student Employees 
Association at Temple struck in 1990, and University of Michigan 
graduates worked with the Teamsters in the late 1980's by setting 
up picket lines that the delivery drivers refused to cross, 
essentially shutting down the campus.  Other organizing is taking 
place at the University of Florida, and at the state university 
systems of New York and New Jersey.


Graduate Students Organizing at UT
	
Graduate students at UT have organized as employees at least as 
early as the mid-1970's.  Graduate students organized a strike as 
part of the Students Helping Academic Freedom at Texas (SHAFT), a 
huge student power movement that called for the resignation of 
interim UT President Lorraine Rogers, the expansion of minority 
support, the assumption of student and faculty control over UT, and 
the end of political attacks on faculty and student organizations.  
The Graduate Student Caucus organized an "Evacuation Day" in 
October 1975 when TA's and graduate students would hold their 
classes off campus, call in sick, or postpone their classes.  About 
250 participated, at a rate of 50% in some departments.
	The Union of Graduate Student Workers (UGSW), which grew out 
of these efforts, was organized in 1976 with the following demands: 
1) a fair TA workload with adequate compensation, 2) fair and 
equitable hiring practices, 3) clearly defined, systematic TA rights, 
4) reasonable class sizes, 5) relief from forced participation in the 
Teacher Retirement System and waiving of tuition and building use 
fees for TA's, and 6) a meaningful voice in educational planning, 
whereby opinions and involvement of TA's are actively sought and 
respected.  UGSW grew out of the Graduate Student Caucus of SHAFT 
by students wanting to form a union.  Although the union only lasted 
about a year, they were successful in forcing UT to let TA's out of 
Teacher Retirement, which charged about $20 a month.
	In 1980, the organizing began to pay off.  In the summer, 
students in the Economics Department studied the financial needs of 
TA's, compared them with other departments and schools, and 
showed that their real wages had dropped 40% in five years.  After 
they presented their findings to the department and the dean, they 
were given a raise.  Economics TA's then went to other departments 
telling graduate students how they did it.  In the fall, about 100 TA's 
joined the AFL-CIO-affiliated UT Employees Union (UTEU), but were 
kicked out when the union feared the growing size of TA's among 
their membership.  Although another union, the University Employees 
Union, formed in January and asked the TA's to join, many were fed 
up with unions and did not.
	In February 1980, University of Houston (UH) TA's went on 
strike after a 5.1% emergency pay increase from the legislature was 
denied to UH TA's.  They were demanding pay raises, tuition and fee 
waivers, administrative support for academic freedom, and health 
benefits.  After three days, the TA's went back to work after 
negotiations began.
	TA's at UT who were involved in UTEU sent a telegram 
supporting their demands--especially the waivers and $850/month 
minimum salary.  TA's from both UT and UH formed the Houston-
Austin Solidarity Coalition (HASC) and held solidarity 
demonstrations on February 18 on both campuses at the same time.  
Five hundred attended the UT rally and threatened to strike if they 
did not receive wage increases.  When UH balked on the pay raise, the 
TA's went back on strike in March. 
	In April, the UT HASC group issued a position paper demanding 
academic freedom, minimum monthly salaries of $850, full medical 
and dental benefits, tuition and fee waivers, no increase in 
workloads, and maintenance of class sizes.  In June UT offered a 14% 
pay increase, but HASC refused and threatened to strike if their 
demands were not met.  In July they got a 20% increase for TA's and 
AI's, and dental insurance in September.  With hindsight, it is 
apparent why graduate students have yet to win waivers for tuition 
and fees.  If the university were to concede to this demand it would 
be shutting off a significant source of unreserved capital it has long 
used for entrepreneurial projects.
	In 1990, the Graduate Professional Association (GPA) won a 
the restoration of UT's contribution to premium sharing for graduate 
student employees after 26 months of fighting and studying UT's 
financial records.  In 1988, the 
Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board had declared health 
supplements illegal under a technical definition that required 
employees to be part of the Teachers Retirement system.  In effect, 
the state attempted to turn graduate students' earlier victory 
(removal from Teachers' Retirement) against us to save a few 
million dollars a year.
	Although the UT administration eventually pledged support for 
continued health coverage after much protest by COGS and GPA, they 
did little to lobby the legislature to fund it.  The victory took 
marches on the capitol and Regents' offices, lobbying, power 
structure research, and two huge Main Mall rallies.  About 70% of the 
members and the four officers of COGS formed the off-campus group 
GPA, and organized a huge "teach-in" that attracted almost 8,000 
undergraduate and graduate students for classes and office hours.  
	When graduate students discovered that only $1 million was 
necessary to cover the premium sharing that the coordinating board 
had eliminated funding for in 1988, the legislature approved the 
payments but didn't fund it.  After continued protests, UT would 
offer only $90 per graduate student, leaving a potential pay loss of 
$65 when the total cost of insurance would increase to $155.  Yet, 
during the quiet summer month of June 1990, the Regents caved in 
under pressure for the full $155.  The information used against UT 
was found by filing Open Record Requests for the "Monthly Reports" 
that list the activity and number of each of UT's bank accounts.  GPA 
found an account with the necessary amount of money and threatened 
to expose what it was used for, and even released the account 
number to the Daily Texan.  The day the number was published, Vice 
President Ed Sharpe called GPA, conceding the supplements. 
	Following the failure of a coalition of 12 student and faculty 
groups to stop the graduate tuition increases in Fall 1991, last 
spring GPA and COGS turned their focus to working at departmental 
levels to promote the idea of waivers, wage increases, and other 
issues.  However, for many years, organizing has taken place quietly 
on department levels as graduate students have formed their own 
groups to request more diverse faculty and classes as well as 
improved working conditions, and to deal with other issues specific 
to their departments.
	A number of graduate students from COGS and GPA have 
currently established a graduate student caucus within the Texas 
State Employees Union (TSEU) which has about 200 campus members.  
One of their strategies is to draw the connection between the 
impact of entrepreneurialization on graduate students in the form of 
higher tuition and fees, and on custodians who have lost their jobs in 
the Recreation Sports Center and the PCL library.  (The private 
contractor which was awarded the contract by UT offered to re-hire 
the workers on a part-time basis without health benefits and other 
benefits required for all full-time state employees.)   As the university entrepreneurializes, staff 
and students are being targeted for cutbacks, a connection that 
offers the potential for linking up these different groups. 

Time to Get Organized
	
No matter how we decide to do it, graduate students need to get 
organized at UT or continue to face running battles over tuition, 
health care, fees, etc. that we will not be likely to win very often. 
Whether we go the way of forming a union or another type of 
organization depends on more than a handful of people deciding for 
us. 
	Throughout the U.S., graduate students are working with 
undergraduates and faculty on a wide range of issues from 
multiculturalism to wage increases.  Students are getting organized 
to put a stop to the austerity sweeping the universities while 
attempting to carve out spaces for themselves on their campuses.  
As long as the cutbacks continue we will be increasingly incapable 
of devoting ourselves to what we came to graduate school in the 
first place while faced with the constant worry of tuition and fee 
increases, rising childcare costs, racial and sexual harassment, and 
declining wages and financial aid.  And as we organize ourselves, we 
shatter the myth that graduate students are "professionals" who 
passively accept their own destitution. 
The Other Texan can be reached at PO Box 49814, Austin, TX
78765; (512) 471-3166; ettib@utxvm.cc.utexas.edu

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