U Oregon and the Academic Labor System

Over at DailyNous, we read that the University of Oregon has sent a letter to international graduate students warning them that they would face deportation if they were to join a strike being undertaken against the university by the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation (GTFF). 

Several things should be said about this.

1) The threat appears to be credible. As I understand matters on the basis of conversations with folks who have had hiring responsibilities that frequently involved graduate students on the type of visa that is likely involved here, all the university would have to do is report to Homeland Security that the students are no longer complying with the conditions of their visas. 

2) The above highlights the extent to which international graduate student labor is an extreme form of the sort of captive, precarious labor provided by un-unionized graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) more generally—and the importance of which once led Marc Bosquet, in one of his seminal pieces on the academic labor system, to characterize actually granted PhDs as "the waste product of graduate education." Because international graduate students typically have no legal option but to work for their university employers, they represent possibly the perfect form of GTA labor. 

3) Graduate Teaching Assistant unions—which may cover more than TAs narrowly so called, also including graduate students teaching as adjunct faculty, etc.*—represent a threat to this academic labor system. I'll say a little more about this third point, and draw some general conclusions, in what follows.

[In the mean time, I encourage folks to consider adding their names to the open letter that John Protevi is hosting on his blog, calling on the University of Oregon to abandon its current tactics against the union and to grant them the very reasonable benefits they are demanding.]

To return to point three above, to the extent that GTA unionization drives have been successful, universities have often responded with aggressive union-busting moves—including, to take the example of some of what Temple University has done in response to its relatively recently unionized GTAs, the introduction of strict limits on the hiring of graduate students covered by union bargaining units. Those limits have taken several forms: TA-ships have dried up; adjunct work after the end of a student's guaranteed'funding-period has become extremely difficult to come by; departments and programs have been instructed to prefer non-student adjuncts, or even outright forbidden to hire students enrolled in university programs, to whom they would have to pay benefits. Effectively, what this amounts to is the university being quite willing to make completion of a graduate degree as difficult as possible for members of a graduate student union in order to break the union. What Oregon is doing here is quite clearly another case in point—even if it is taking place in relation to a union that is now more than 35 years old.

All of the above indicates that Bosquet's analysis of the academic labor system remains apt in many respects. But it also suggests that the 'floor' of the academic labor system is complex and needs to be understood as such. GTAs, narrowly construed, are a relatively cheap form of labor at most institutions--certainly one that facilitates systems of undergraduate instruction where small numbers of prestige-faculty are able to provide instruction to very large numbers of students of the labor of relatively inexpensive TAs. On the other hand, GTA labor may well be relatively expensive by comparison to that of adjunct faculty who can be hired as instructors of record working without any TAs. As the pool of such adjunct faculty—what one might, extending Bosquet's metaphor, call the recaptured 'waste product'—available to university employers increases, TAs become a relatively less attractive workforce, especially if their unions also threaten to increase the cost of hiring current graduate students to fill the adjunct faculty role (by forcing universities to extend benefits to them, etc.). GTA unions' bargaining leverage, like that of other faculty organizations pushing for improvements in pay and working conditions, will thus be substantially compromised by the availability of a large, un-unionized adjunct workforce in any area. And more generally, the 'floor' of the academic labor system is constituted by a complex set involving multiple groups of precarious workers who can be played off against one another. In this respect, the attempt to divide the international students from the main body of GTFF employees is another step in the maintenance of this same basic arrangement.

 

 

*This is the case at U Oregon, where all employees enrolled in graduate programs are represented by the GTFF. It is also the case at Temple, which I discuss below.