I’ve been talking a lot this summer about theories of change – and whether the ones we use in UK students’ unions work.
As block grant funding tightens and the higher education “unit of resource” gets squeezed further still, there are real questions over the existing models that we have for student representation and its efficacy at getting things done for students.
More on that in coming weeks – but here I wanted to briefly reflect on something quite extraordinary that’s been going on in the US.
The United States’ HE system does not have a stellar reputation for student representation. “Student Unions” are really university-run student services buildings; so-called “student governments” are often poorly funded; and while student activism over global affairs picks up coverage, it tends to be focussed in the “Ivy League” of elite universities.
As such you might expect that one of the UK’s traditional weak spots – representation for PGR students – to be just as weak. But over the past two years the number of PGRs who are members of trade unions has surged – from 64,400 to 150,100. 38 percent of PGRs who work at their university are now unionised.
A report this week from the the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College also found that while traditional trade unions have been recruiting, there are now 10 bargaining units made up exclusively of postdoctoral scholars who work – covering 11,471 PhD student employees.
Even more interesting, there are now 19 exclusive undergraduate student employee units, with 3,515 represented employees covering roles in student services, admissions, marketing and catering. So what’s going on?
Doctoral issues
When PGRs teach (or act in other roles like demonstrators in labs), there’s a litany of issues – unlike career staff in HE, there’s no national pay deal, for example. Rates of pay vary wildly – and the potential for that work to be exploitative and precarious is high.
Where SUs have worked on these issues in the past, they’ve found bullying, a poor recruitment and selection processes (characterised by a “tap on the shoulder” for “the usual suspects”), weak management and training and poor HR processes.
Ironically, this is also a group that gets frequently leaned on to keep universities going. In many universities, without PGRs, timetables would collapse and marking would pile up. When strikes come along, it’s often our PGRs that are pressured into delivering alternative arrangements.
Over the years in the UK, the PGR issue has waxed and waned. Few SUs could say hand on heart that they’ve cracked representing PGRs – the handful of separate PG SUs have now largely merged with their main SU – and while every few years UCU makes a play for the recruitment of and work for PGRs, nothing much tends to come of it.
There’s certainly no national pay deal for PGRs, still.
Outside of UCU there have also been sporadic attempts by general trade unions like Unite and the GMB to recruit student workers with jobs both on and off campus – but again, they never seem to get anywhere.
It’s only really in Nursing and Midwifery where the RCN and the RCM seem to be active in recruiting – often jostling with Unison at Freshers’ Fairs (or at least welcome days in those schools and facilities) to get sign-ups.
So what has happened in the US is an interesting story that bears reflecting upon.
No benevolence at Brown
In 2004, PhD students at Brown University were not happy. There were concerns about wages, benefits, supervision and working conditions – and they wanted proper recognition of their roles as both students and employees.
Rather than depend on benevolence from the university or the UG-focussed student government, and assuming that the main academic unions would de-prioritise them, they decided to try to gain collective bargaining rights to negotiate with the university management.
But things didn’t go well. In 2004, the National Labor Relations Board ruled against a graduate student union forming at the university, preventing those workers from organising at private colleges and universities. The argument – that it had advanced since the 70s – was that PhD students could not be considered employees because they “primarily” work for learning purposes.
The ruling didn’t affect PhD students with jobs at public universities – but there tends to be fewer of them as a percentage in those providers.
In the private universities, the decision on whether those students could unionise or not was left to state lawmakers, who tend to set their states’ public sector collective bargaining laws. And most said no.
But then in 2016 the NLRB changed its mind, ruling that Columbia University PhD student workers could unionise. That ruling set a precedent allowing students in other private universities to do so too. The pandemic got in the way – but as conditions worsened and more universities began to depend on PhD students to keep courses running, the need to unionise got stronger.
At Georgetown University, student organising began in 2017 when managers raised required working hours of all PhD students consulting them and without raising their pay. That triggered organising, a successful unionisation vote in 2018 and the ratification of a new contract in May 2020 – with pay raises and better health care.
At Harvard, students founded an organising committee in 2015 to fight for higher wages, stronger anti-harassment measures and expanded healthcare and family leave – in an institution with a very traditional idea of a graduate degree that students argued “revolves around the abuse of graduate students and a disrespect for the time and labour we put into our work.” They’ve since won an approx 30 per cent raise for hourly workers, new funds for out-of-pocket health care costs and an entirely new fund for tax and legal services for international students.
Success has spread. In the past few months alone there have been successful actions at MIT, Southern California, UC Santa Cruz, Dartmouth and Boston.
Could / should it happen here?
There are few PhD students in the UK that would say that the messy hybrid of both their SU and their UCU branch largely ignoring them is working. So the question is what could or should happen next.
In Denmark, Studenteransattes Nationalsforbund (SUL) is a more than 50-year-old trade union that organises and negotiates on behalf of student employees at the country’s universities as well as schools of architecture, music conservatories and art academies.
SUL’s collective agreement covers student teaching assistants, instructors, hourly assistant teachers, teaching assistants, student study supervisors, academic supervisors and demonstrators. A report from Ireland a few months back details similar structures in other countries.
In reality there are a number of choices. SUs could take on some of the crunchier work around pay and conditions – but without the statutory power (or brand) or a trade union, would probably struggle to secure meaningful improvements.
UCU could be persuaded to take more on – although multiple motions to its Congress have mandated that to little long-term avail.
Arguably, both have failed because they’ve been top-down. When PhD students (fairly spontaneously) started organising around UKRI stipend levels in 2022, they made progress – but the group didn’t sustain.
It’s likely and probable that what PhD students really need in the UK is a dedicated trade union – probably with some initial set up support from a group of interested students’ unions. The ball is in SUs’ court.
On this topic, i would check out the Graduate Employee Organisation at UMass Amherst on of the first PGR unions. They were formed not by the university trade union (AAUP) but by the United Automotive Union (UAW) as the AAUP was not adequately representing them (parallels to the current situation with UCU up for debate). https://www.geouaw.org/