Grad Reps vote unanimously in favor of collective bargaining rights.
The University of Maryland community prides itself in the effort to make our institution stick out
above all the rest. Unfortunately, the university does stick out from its peers in one very big negative way: it does not
allow its graduate assistants to unionize. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of UMD's "peer
institutions" have collective bargaining for their graduate employees (Berkeley, UCLA, Illinois, and Michigan),
and despite the fact that collective bargaining has become the national norm for graduate employee life-over 60 campuses
in the US have graduate employee collective bargaining organizations-the state of Maryland has thus far said that grad
employees here are unlike every other public employee in the state: they are not workers and thus have no right to form
collective bargaining organizations.
However, we have been building up enough momentum to change this and make the University of Maryland the place it deserves to
be-- a truly democratic place where all university employees have a guaranteed right to have more than an advisory role in
university decisions, enshrined in a legally-binding collective bargaining agreement.
For the third time in recent years representatives of the graduate student body voted to give graduate employees the
rights to engage in collective bargaining; this time, the vote at Graduate Student Government was unanimous in favor of
granting grads those rights. The recent GSG resolution is another in a long line of grad student viewpoints here at UMD
rejecting that claim as ridiculous and not descriptive of graduate life on the College Park campus. This resolution, similar
to GSG resolutions in favor of Collective Bargaining passed in 2002 and 2007, recognizes that having collective bargaining
rights gives grad workers more leverage to earn higher stipends, better health care benefits, more job security, and a chance
to better handle to high the cost of living in the College Park/metro DC area. [To read the resolution in its entirety, click
here.]
The resolution will play an important role in the upcoming state legislative session as local senators introduce a bill to grant higher education workers collective bargaining rights.