College Unrest: Why Joe Hill, Mother Jones and Cesar Chavez are Smiling

By DON ROLLINS

In an op-ed featured in the Jan. 9, 2018, edition of The Guardian, NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar railed against the ongoing economic exploitation of college athletes. Citing the $92 million netted (not grossed) by the University of Texas in 2015, the Hall of Famer called for ending a practice that even in ideal financial times, offers no direct monetary benefit to the athletes themselves.

Little has changed in the months since Abdul-Jabbar’s call for profit sharing. His vision of economic justice for student-athletes continues to languish in the public realm — a state of affairs that only reinforces a servile status quo begun with Reconstruction-era football.

Yet despite the lack of progress on the athletic front, the news is substantially better for another segkment of university students caught up in a culture of exploitation: graduate student employees. Best typified by those who teach courses, grade exams and perform research, until recent times these M.A. and Ph.D candidates have been at the mercy of survival-level department pay scales.

The first substantive change to this system came during the turmoil of the late 1960s, when grad students at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) formed the first student union. Since that time 33 institutions have recognized teaching and graduate assistants as employed workers, granting them the right to collective bargaining.

Not surprisingly, this trend toward unionization has been met with concerted resistance. No one argues that many universities and colleges are financially strapped; but as cited this summer by Science Careers contributing correspondent, Beryl Lieff Bend, those schools have become their own worst enemy by reducing the number of tenured track positions in favor of assistant and adjunct instructors — people who perform many of the same tasks as grad students. For a lot more money.

This discrepancy is the driving force behind college-style collectivism. To date the by far most effective way to harness that energy is through legal appeals to state labor relations boards (LRBs). Here in Pennsylvania student petitioners at Temple (2001) and Penn State (2016) followed that course and won the right to hold a vote. And despite fitful opposition from administration, graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh in October got hearings before the state’s LRB. Given the precedents set by those previous boards, proponents of Pitt’s student unions are optimistic.

Still, there’s a larger force at play in all this — a megatrend evidently lost to administrators and boards like those at Pitt. As Lieff Benderly observes, “Given the facts of university economics and the current academic job market, the old system appears gone forever. Many faculty members are humane, well-meaning people who had no part in creating the current situation, but it does not change that fact. Minimal decency would therefore seem to require that universities acknowledge this reality and recognize their graduate employees’ right to join together and try to improve their resulting, unenviable lot.”

The saga of student unionization is many things at once: a generational coup, an economic reckoning and a twist on old school campus unrest. But it’s also an inspiring, classic instance of labor rising up against management, refusing to be seen but not heard.

So progressives can say amen that our young sisters, brothers and others have taken up the mantle of collective bargaining. A proud tradition continues. Somewhere Joe Hill, Mother Jones and Cesar Chavez might be smiling a little … right before they ask us why those athletes across campus still aren’t making a single dime.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister and substance abuse counselor living in Pittsburgh, Pa. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2018

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