By Apurva Mahajan

Various student, faculty and staff-run organizations on campus are advocating for legislation that would guarantee academic workers collective bargaining with University of Maryland administration and lead to better working conditions and livable wages.

Graduate assistants and faculty across the University System of Maryland do not have collective bargaining rights, which means workers cannot create legally recognized unions or binding contracts with their employers. In other words, administrators have no legal obligation to listen to the concerns of these workers.

“We have general demands and we can make a contract with those demands and send it to university administration, but they don’t have to agree to them,” said Nate Beard, a graduate information studies student and the alliances chair of Fearless Student Employees. “When [administration] break[s] one of those stipulations in the contract … they don’t get in trouble. There’s no access to the labor relations court or board, so it’s not a legally binding contract.”

House Bill 275 and Senate Bill 247 in the Maryland General Assembly would allow graduate assistants and faculty in public higher education institutions across the state the right to collectively bargain. The bills are currently assigned to the House Appropriations committee and the Senate Finance committee.

Administrators like Steve Fetter, the associate provost and dean of the graduate school, and Jennifer King Rice, the senior vice president and provost, have personally testified against these bills in Annapolis. 

“Their testimony against the bill was . . . that teaching assistants do one kind of work while research assistants do another kind of work, so those should be two separate bargaining units that will have to run two separate elections, represented by possibly two different unions,” said Samuel DiBella, a graduate information studies student and the co-chair of FSE’s media committee. “That’s just so much more work for people to have to do to actually be able to organize.” 

Rather than implementing a system where different types of labor are represented by separate unions, FSE is working towards wall-to-wall or industrial unionism, where all workers can unionize regardless of their job title in a single large bargaining unit, which is a group of employees represented by a single union. 

This allows workers to have more leverage in bargaining, but it might not be possible due to the unique needs and issues each group of workers faces and because labor boards are the ones who determine what the bargaining units consist of, said DiBella.

Graduate research assistants often have to work extra hours beyond the 20 hour limit detailed for assistantships. They are also sometimes used as cheaper instructors to teach sections of classes and not given credit for the publications they assist on or the grants they apply for on behalf of advisors, according to DiBella.

“If we stopped working, the university would stop working. And all we’re asking is that the university recognizes and respects that,” DiBella said.

The UMD chapter of the American Association of University Professors conducted a financial analysis of the university in March 2022 and found that the salaries of top administrators are disproportionately increasing at a much higher rate than other salaries.

The number of administrators increased in recent years while the number of tenure and tenure track faculty decreased. Tenure and tenure track positions are where workers have guaranteed long-term employment that can only be taken away in extraordinary conditions. From 2014 to 2022, full-time non-tenure track faculty increased by 19.26% while full-time tenure or tenure track faculty decreased by 6.87%.

The decrease in tenured faculty means that less faculty have guaranteed permanent jobs and long-term employment security. 

Adjunct faculty are paid very little for the courses they teach, which means many have to teach a lot of courses at multiple campuses across the state, according to Luka Arsenjuk, secretary of UMD AAUP and associate professor in the languages, literatures and cultures and cinema and media studies departments.

The university runs on a system of shared governance, which means that all faculty members should have a say in curricular, financial and budgetary matters.

“This system of shared governance is absolutely not working,” said Arsenjuk. “There exists a faculty senate on campus, but it’s mostly in the advisory role, whereas most of the decisions that get made — and certainly the crucial ones — are made by the administrators, by the managers of the university system.” 

United Students Against Sweatshops advocates for the unionization of student workers who aren’t employed in an academic capacity like graduate assistants are. One of their demands is a $22.65 hourly minimum wage for all workers, which comes from the MIT living wage calculator’s estimate for a living wage in Prince George’s County.

“Even though officially, on paper, this is not a for-profit university, this is a capitalist system,” said Kelsey Coleman, senior Black liberation studies and performing arts major and president of USAS Local 54. “This university, like any other public or private university in this country, is about generating more money for its shareholders and . . . upper level administration. It’s not about meeting the needs of actual workers.”

The single legally recognized union on campus is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1072, which represents over 3,400 UMD staff who are in non-academic positions like groundskeepers, IT professionals, academic advisors and facilities employees.

As of last year, AFSCME higher education locals are in direct bargaining with USM to create a master agreement that will discuss wages, working conditions and other bargaining subjects for all employees of higher education institutions in Maryland, according to Todd Holden, president of Local 1072. 

“At College Park, there seems to be this unfortunate culture where an employee’s day to day experience is directly influenced by where they work, and who they work for,” said Holden. “Collective bargaining and union representation solves that because it does demand fairness, equitable treatment and transparency for everybody.”

Since College Park has a high cost of living that is not reflected in employees’ salaries, they often need to take on second or third jobs and live in multifamily or multi-generational housing or deal with a long commute and still pay for parking on campus, Holden said. 

“When it comes to setting priorities, there is a tendency for people to really ignore the uncomfortable stuff,” Holden said. “Even when choices are hard, the administration and the university still have an obligation to examine those hard choices and ultimately do what’s right by their workers.”

Featured Image: The University of Maryland administration building on March 6, 2023. Photo by Apurva Mahajan

Correction: Luka Arsenjuk’s title has been updated.