Not surprisingly, it is in the latter realm that union support is also the strongest. I do not believe that a graduate-worker union will be capable of redressing this deeper inequity. The problems are simply too deep and too far beyond the university itself. Nor is this even in the interests of a labor union. Labor unions do not defer the marketplace in the name of research or truth.
Labor unions are thus a defensive accommodation to the impersonality of the marketplace.
Not that we should bemoan this dependency. Unions that truly transcend the marketplace are socialist utopias, and we have seen rather grimly this century that their consequences are more bloody and violent than the dark Satanic mills of the hated bourgeoisie. What we should rather be suspicious of is the capacity of a labor union to recognize the paradoxical position of the student-worker. The graduate union movement is a wake-up call to all levels of the university hierarchy, from graduate students, to adjuncts, to faculty, to the highest levels of administrative power. If we can't get tenure, we had better get collective bargaining.