Last week the leaders of the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), also known as the Teaching Assistants' union, distributed a strike authorization ballot to union members. GEO's leaders had become frustrated with what they perceived to be the University administrators' intransigence on key points in negotiations over a new TA contract. When the results were tallied, more than 80 percent of GEO members had authorized the union's leaders to call a strike if contract negotiations continued to be unproductive. That strike, if it comes, likely will occur in April, coincident with the busiest weeks of the semester.
There are many reasons to want to avoid a strike -- the adverse impact on students; the suspension of pay, and therefore academic progress, for striking TAs; the ill-will it may create between TAs and the professors who will have to assume our workloads, and so on. But the best reason to avoid a strike is that on balance our old contract was both fair and generous, and the GEO's current demands are often unreasonable and unimportant.
One of the key sticking points between the University and the union is the question of pay for Teaching Assistants (our new title is actually "Graduate Student Instructor," a product of our union's efforts). Currently, TAs with a full teaching load receive just over $1000 per month before taxes. The union is trying to negotiate a $334 per month raise to be phased in over three years. Though a 33 percent raise even in nominal terms seems fairly ambitious, the union at least has an argument -- that is the amount required to bring teaching assistant salaries in line with the cost of living in Ann Arbor.
Two points need to be made here. First, if one makes the right choices and lives very modestly, one can live in Ann Arbor on $1000 per month. We know. We've done it. Second, on an hourly basis a teaching assistant with a full course load receives a little more than $12 per hour. If you convert that to an annualized income assuming a 40-hour work week, it translates to nearly $25,000 per year. For one person that is a decidedly middle-class salary. In other words, we are already being paid fairly well for the work we do.
But that is not the point, GEO's leaders argue. TAs work only 20 to 25 hours a week and do that only eight months out of the year. Under those conditions $12/hour does not add up to enough money to meet living costs for a full 12 months. This should not be surprising -- there are not many jobs in America that pay a full-time wage for half-time work during two-thirds of the year. Furthermore, looking at salaries alone obscures the very generous non-monetary compensation we receive as Teaching Assistants. In any semester we teach we pay no tuition. For an out-of-state student with a full course load, that tuition credit alone has a value of about $18,000 per year. We receive generous health care benefits as well, valued in the neighborhood of $1300 a year. Granted, tuition credits and health care plans cannot be eaten, but the $19,300 saved on tuition and insurance could certainly buy a lot of food.
There is nothing wrong with GEO seeking a pay raise, of course. Like most teaching assistants, we put a lot of effort and energy into teaching. We both have been nominated for teaching awards by our students. Neither of us, therefore, would feel any embarrassment or guilt over a reasonable pay raise. But 30 percent is not reasonable. The University is right to resist meeting demands of this nature, and our union would be wrong to call a strike if administrators continue to resist.
The rest of the issues in the contract negotiations vary in importance and in the extent of agreement between the GEO and the University, but none of them carries significant merit to cause a strike. Stricter enforcement of affirmative action guidelines? We do not believe in affirmative action in this setting or any other and would not walk out in support of it. Elimination of the $80 registration fee? We would rather not pay it, but we will manage. Reimbursement for taxes paid on health care benefits for same-sex "domestic partners?" We think the University is being quite generous in subsidizing those benefits in the first place. Improved dental benefits? We'd rather floss than strike.
We understand that any one issue taken alone may not appear to be very significant, and that what matters more is the administration's attitude toward the union and its interests in the aggregate. But on that score GEO's leaders see themselves and the University differently than we do. We find the way GEO presents itself -- the logo with the pencil in the clenched fist, the rhetoric about being exploited, and so on -- genuinely distressing because it implies that many of our fellow graduate students feel ill-used by the University. Graduate school is difficult, to be sure. It is demanding and stressful, and it requires that one sacrifice, among other things, income, a social life, and entertainment for anywhere from five to ten years. If one is married with children, it is that much harder. However, portraying ourselves as kindred with the oppressed proletariat when we work part-time, doing indoor work involving no heavy lifting and, in comparison, relatively little stress, receiving training for a more advanced career, and receiving benefits which, if counted along with our income, would push us solidly into the middle class -- that is simply insupportable.
None of this is to say that we do not appreciate our union leaders' efforts on our behalf. We are very grateful that they have spent hour after hour at the negotiating table so that we do not have to do so. And we know that we would not have the pay, benefits, and various administrative protections we do have were it not for their efforts. Finally, we believe a decent wage, a manageable workload, and administrative fairness are worth the fight. But we think that our expired contract generally provided those things, and that calling a strike rather than renewing that contract (incorporating some important concessions University negotiators already made) would be indefensible. For this reason, if GEO decides to walk out of the classroom in April, we will not walk with it.