Worried the wrong side might win a union election? No problem -- simply cancel it. At least, that seems to be the tactic anti-worker Michigan Republicans seem to be using. The GOP-controlled government seems set to approve legislation that would to block more than 2,200 Graduate Student Research Assistants (GSRAs) at the University of Michigan from forming a union.
In April 2011, after a eight-month campaign, more than 1,200 RAs came together to file a petition with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC) demanding a union election for RAs, asking MERC to overturn a prior administrative ruling that suggested that GSRAs were merely students and didn't have additional status as public employees.
To make a long story short, over the last year, MERC has agreed to reconsider its past ruling and remanded the issue to an administrative law judge to conduct a fact-finding hearing into the matter. That hearing took place in February and wrapped up last week and the judge will issue a recommendation by the next meeting of MERC on March 13.
Afraid that the administrative process wouldn't go the right way, State Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville (R- of course) hurriedly introduced Senate Bill 0971, which amends the Public Employee Relations Act of Michigan to specifically state that RAs are not employees. He introduced the bill on February 16. It flew through committee on February 21 and was passed by the full Senate the next day. On Feb. 28, it passed through committee in the House. Yesterday, it was rushed to the House floor with no notice and passed without debate. In both chambers, the bill passed on a party-line vote.
Richardville claimed that he introduced the bill after talking with RAs who were concerned about "being unionized."
Somehow, I suspect that he never spoke with any of the 1,200 RAs who support having collective bargaining rights, like these two RAs who testified at the house hearing. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one.
For those of you who are Michigan residents, please contact governor Rick Snyder and tell him to veto Senate Bill 0971, which is merely a mean-spirited way to block collective bargaining rights for several thousand workers at public universities across the state. The state AFL-CIO has a handy letter up here If you'd rather call or fax him, try here. Remember, be firm but polite. He's a Republican, which is all the more reason why you should bother him.
For more information on the Graduate Employees Organization, the local union which RAs are members of, see GEO's Home Page.
If you're interested in the twists and turns surrounding this yearlong saga, follow me below the fold. I promise the story has all the elements that Kossacks love to hate.
You say you want a second rate right-wing ALEC-affiliated think tank? It comes standard!
A highly partisan state attorney general who likes to file frivolous lawsuits at taxpayer expense? We got one!
High level, high-priced administrators making incoherent arguments and behaving badly? Done and done!
Retaliation against union activists? Check!
Most importantly, issues like this one show yet again why we progressives have to fight hard for good candidates at the local and state levels. See you on the flip side.
The story starts in the early 1970s with the formation of the Graduate Employees Organization, a labor union formed by graduate students serving as teaching and research assistants at Michigan.
They were a part of the bargaining unit with Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) but were kicked out of the GEO in 1980 by an administrative ruling from the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC) that said that RAs weren’t employees.
You can read a brief history of GEO here.
(Note -- a summary similar to this one-- written by me-- is also on Balloon Juice and kindly posted by the blogger Kay. Her trademark work does a really good job showing how big policy changes affect local communities and she's well worth following)
Fast forward to the summer of 2010, when GEO was approached by a group of GSRAs who wanted to become part of GEO. GEO members thought the time was ripe and we started an organizing campaign. In April 2011, as I mentioned above, more than 1,200 GSRAs – 55 percent of the roughly 2,200 RAs employed at UM – signed cards and petitioned MERC to demand a union election. We had a roughly 75 percent sign-up rate of the RAs were could actually find.
UM President Mary Sue Coleman and other top university administrators ferociously opposed the granting collective bargaining rights, but were overruled by the elected Board of Regents in May 2011.
Despite the Regents’ 6-2 vote, many faculty members and administrators continued to openly oppose the GSRA union. They claimed that a union would bring in outsiders and interfere with the sacred magical “mentor-mentee” relationship between advisor and advisee and interfere with the academic judgment of professors. Somehow, a graduate union run by GSRAs for GSRAs would destroy research at the University of Michigan and protect inferior students. If this reasoning and logic sounds similar to most of the other anti-union campaigns you've heard before, you'd be right.
Oddly, reason and logic seemed to be in, short supply the scientists and scholars, in their arguments in opposition. For instance , see this fine example in which an associate dean with a doctorate degree from one of the best universities in the country waxes poetic about how a union would destroy the University of Michigan:
Here's an example of his logic:
First, unionization negatively impacts or destroys the very process by which the best students are being educated: A third party (the union) is intervening in an educational program that critically depends on the trust and mentorship relation of faculty and their students. Many great faculty and Ph.D. candidates will immediately recognize this as an obstacle toward achieving educational success.
Our Ph.D.’s are not about doing the same as others, but about creating the best results, the greatest impact. How could a union possibly help that objective?
Second, our competitiveness to recruit top talent would substantially decrease. Many of my most successful colleagues and fellow professors would not seriously consider working in a place with unionized graduate students.
He doesn’t cite any empirical evidence for his claims in the article.
Here's how two of my colleagues and I responded to him. (I'm a long-time GSI at Michigan.):
First, Zurbuchen believes that unions would insert some destructive phantom “third party” into the system and destroy the educational process. Few things could be further from the truth. The union isn’t some mysterious alien force; it’s merely an organization made of the same talented hard-working graduate students with whom he collaborates every day. Both the [House Officers Association which represents medical residents] and GEO are horizontal, democratic, participatory unions. No “third-party” union bosses call the shots here, only members and their democratically selected local leaders. Like Zurbuchen, our members deeply value the student-mentorship relationship with professors and attending physicians. However, they find that unionization helps strengthen that relationship by providing an enforcement mechanism, which currently does not exist, to remind mentors of their obligations.
Through collective bargaining, graduate student employees take the responsibility to work together and present their interests to the university, while the university presents its own priorities. The two sides work together to achieve a mutually acceptable agreement.
Under the current GEO contract, the university has broad rights in matters of academic judgment and retains significant flexibility in hiring decisions, which should negate some of the fear that Zurbuchen raises about unions snuffing out talent. In return, GEO has negotiated a comprehensive job-posting website, which helps graduate students find jobs --- and also helps departments and managers select from a wider variety of talented students.
....
Now we turn to Zurbuchen’s second point, that unionization of graduate employees would hurt the ability to attract talented students and faculty. If this were true, surely it would have occurred with the advent of GEO and the HOA.
Needless to say, the brain drain hasn’t happened. The university still routinely recruits the best and brightest professors in the humanities, social sciences and hard sciences. Departments regularly place among the top five or 10 universities in all the major rankings.
Talented graduate students continue to flock to the university, drawn in part by the competitive salary and health care packages negotiated through GEO. In fact, graduate students routinely say that a strong union is one reason they decided to attend Michigan.
The story at the University of Michigan Health System reads similarly. House Officers have been unionized since 1971, yet Michigan has only solidified its reputation among the leaders and best in the quality of our residency programs, providing superior patient care and routinely making innovative research breakthroughs in both medical science and clinical practice. Michigan’s medical school continues to successfully recruit the best professors and residents - indeed, the medical school’s own website mentions the HOA as a selling point for potential applicants to its residency program.
My favorite response to the faulty reasoning expressed by administrators about how a union would destroy graduate education at the university remains Henry Farrell -- himself a tenured professor -- at
this Crooked Timber post.
As the summer of 2011 moved forward, pressure on GSRAs who wanted collective bargaining increased greatly. Many faculty members openly intimidated their RAs, threatening their letters of recommendation, demanding that they vote against the union, interrupting conversations with organizers.
In one case a professor actually had the gumption to dismiss an RA – who just so happened to be GEO’s treasurer – for “academic reasons.” Neeedless to say, some of us take a more skeptical stance toward the incident.
Remember, how I promised a right-wing think tank?
In August, as these issues were heating up, and MERC began reviewing its 1980 ruling, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy – our state JV associate of the American Legislative Exchange Council -- jumped in to “represent” a GSRA who didn’t want a union and started screaming about “forced unionization.” They then attempted to interfere in the MERC hearing process, by helping organize a group of graduate students who didn't want a union.
I'm not going to link the Mackinac Center's web site, but here's the person they found to represent. She comes on at about the 0:50 mark of the video at the link.
The "no" group represented by Mackinac claims to have 370 members, which you'll note is considerably less than the 1,200 card signers who said they wanted a union.
I also promised a an attorney general behaving badly. First-termer Bill Schuette (R -- naturally), as always, stepped up to the plate. Taking a break from his ongoing crusade to protect Michigan against medical cannibas users, he decided to jump into the party and use taxpayer funds to file a lawsuit to stop the union election.
MERC threw out both the AG and the Mackinac Center’s complaints (as did other courts), opened a formal review of its 1981 ruling and ordered an non-partisan administrative law judge to conduct a fact-finding hearing.
So faced with a ruling likely to go against their political values, what's a low-rent think tank to do? Now, I speculate here, but based circumstantial evidence seems likely the the Mackinac Center leaned on some of their buddies in the legislature to pass a law to thwart the attempts of GSRAs to form a union.
Just to be clear – we all respect the rights of RAs who don’t want a union to vote “no” in a fair election. We also recognize that the university administration would have legitimate interests to protect at the bargaining table. But it’s undemocratic, unfair and underhanded to express these concerns by short circuiting an established administrative process and taking away all the RAs in the state of Michigan's choice on whether or not to form a union.
Again, this is why it's important not just to talk about politics at the 30,000 feet level of presidential politics, but also to work to build strong state and local networks. Because of the Republican Tsunami swamped Michigan in the fall of 2010, thousands of workers are going to be denied rights to collective bargaining.