Column: Why you shouldn't support unionization of Indiana University graduate students
You may have heard that some graduate students want a union and the faculty have voted that they should have one. While this may seem “inside baseball” to many, the outcome has real effects on people outside of Indiana University. To understand this, just consider what you didn’t hear. In the thousands of eloquent and emotional words written during the long faculty meeting and the two-week voting period, nobody ever mentioned money. Remarkably, almost 2,000 highly educated people got together for a vote and completely ignored one of the most fundamental questions: If students are paid a “living wage” for their 20-hour-a-week, 10-month commitment, how much will this cost and who will pay the cost? The faculty acted as if the money can just appear or that taxpayers or tuition-paying students will pay more. Of course, neither taxpayers nor students got to vote.
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You should realize that many departments on campus work responsibly with PhD-level graduate students to give them enough training to build successful careers. These students are offered compensation, including free tuition, agree to study here and are given increasing responsibility in their research and teaching efforts. Most, if not all, graduate students from these departments leave with much better prospects than they entered. There are departments, however, that rely on PhD students to replace faculty in duties that the faculty think are onerous. In many of these departments, students have poor prospects on leaving IU and stay here for as long as they can. For these PhD students, a “living wage” is critical because they have been turned into long-term employees. Much of the demand for the union is coming from these departments.
What the administration confronts now is the prospect of negotiating with a union that will attempt to standardize treatment and compensation across this campus regardless of the effectiveness of the department’s graduate education. The union is “United Electrical Workers”, called “UE”, which was thrown out of the AFL-CIO many years ago because of its political activity. (My dad and I were members of the International Union of Electrical Workers which worked to get rid of UE). UE has never reentered the umbrella of the AFL-CIO, it represents less than 5% of electrical workers, and is still known for its progressive political activity. If this union negotiates for PhD students, responsible use of resources will be more difficult.
In related news: IU Board of Trustees says no to a student labor union, grad workers prepare for fall strike
Of course, this is the point of the “strike” and the adoption of any union. The administration has been rewarding those departments which are effective and penalizing those which are not. (Inside IU it is called “responsibility center management”). If they recognize a union, especially a union like UE, IU’s ability to use resources effectively will certainly diminish. IU will certainly change. Effective departments will be pressured to subsidize less effective departments, intellectual property will become more contentious, and tuition-paying students and taxpayers will be asked to pay more.
So, taxpayers and tuition-paying students should care about this issue. Senior administrators and the trustees undoubtedly understand that graduate students and faculty are not their only responsibility. They are responsible to those who are paying the bills and who have conveniently been left out of the decisions. The trustees should support the administration’s policy of not recognizing this union. When faculty and graduate students stage outraged protests, you should remember who will pay if they win. It will not be the protestors.
Charles Trzcinka is the James and Virginia Cozad Professor of Finance at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Columnist writes taxpayers should not support IU grad worker union
