Graduate assistants at the University of Kansas, Oregon State University and the University of California negotiated paid health insurance. At the University of Michigan, the union negotiated an average raise of about 4 percent a year over five years. Much of Penn graduate students' work is hardly intellectual heavy-lifting and unrelated to the pursuit of doctoral degrees, said Michael Janson, a union organizer at the University of Pennsylvania and a political science teaching assistant. This is obviously an issue that we will take very seriously, but it's way too early on to know what our next moves will be. Part-time faculty at universities has grown from 22 percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 1995, according to the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions.
Some states prohibit students from organizing.
Regardless, organizing can be tough because graduate students are transient. And many schools put up a fight. Temple, NYU and the University of Washington are among those, arguing that students do not have the same rights as other workers because their jobs are part of their education. The school's graduate assistants already are unionized. Read the SunSpot.net User Agreement for our policies on copyright, reader privacy and bulletin boards.