Training Graduate Students as Undervalued Laborers

The undervaluation of work performed by graduate teaching and research assistants is key to the erasure of teaching and service work performed by faculty members, contingent and tenured alike.   Since the establishment of the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) at the University of Wisconsin--Madison in 1966, graduate teaching and research assistants have organized unions at public universities to provide greater stability to their working lives, protections against sexist and racist discrimination, greater transparency and equity in work assignments, and an acknowledgement of the importance of their role in the contemporary university. However, the National Labor Relations Board has denied graduate workers at private universities access to collective bargaining by the National Labor Relations Board. A recent revival of graduate worker organizing in private postsecondary institutions (including NYU, Columbia, The New School, Yale, Harvard, Brown, and Cornell), seeks to overturn that precedent and secure graduate workers the right to form unions and bargain contracts with private universities. Hostile to this organizing, university administrators argue that the teaching and service labor that graduate workers perform produces no value for the university as a whole beyond the purposes of their own graduate education. However, the labor of graduate workers closely parallels work performed by faculty (especially adjuncts), postdocs, and other employees. In response to graduate worker organizing, in other words, administrators have expressed more plainly than usual their undervaluation of teaching and service labor as a whole, illuminating some of the ways in which academic labor writ large is becoming more contingent.