It’s 9 a.m. and Amelia, a counseling PhD candidate, walks into Elliot Hall. It’s almost time for her Monday morning debrief with her cohort mate, Alicia. For the past three months, they have been working to better understand the experiences of cross-racial adoptees. The two make an excellent team, after collecting their data, they have planned to evenly split the remaining work. Their finished manuscript will list Amelia and Alicia as equal collaborators, their advisor as co-author and “University of Minnesota” will be emblazoned under every name.
Amelia is a fellow. Alicia is a research assistant. Their work is identical, so why doesn’t the University of Minnesota want them to have the same union protections?
For over a year, Graduate Labor Union – United Electric (GLU-UE) Local 1105 has been negotiating the first collective bargaining agreement for graduate workers at the University. Over this period, University administration has repeatedly shown little interest in bargaining in good faith. Their latest transgression involves brazenly ignoring state law by failing to implement recent changes to the Public Employment Labor Relations Act (PELRA) that clearly places graduate fellows into the bargaining unit GLU-UE represents. These actions would exclude many graduate workers from the benefits and protections secured in the GLU-UE contract.
Graduate workers at the University are funded in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most well-known funding sources are teaching assistantships, whereby graduate workers earn a living teaching, mentoring or grading. They may also be funded via administrative roles or research assistantships, which involve working on one or more research projects. Often overlooked, however, are graduate “fellows,” who are funded through internal or external fellowships, awards provided either by the University and private or public entities, respectively.
Fellowships, especially those supported by external agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF), are accompanied with significant prestige, not just for the graduate worker, but also the affiliated university. The University goes through great lengths to help individuals secure these fellowships, for example, the Department of Psychology offers a course every fall (PSY8101) for the sole purpose of training and encouraging graduate workers to apply for the NSF-funded Graduate Research Fellowship Program. This practice is not unique to psychology.
Departments across the University shower recipients with praise, profiling external fellowship awardees online and using their achievements as a selling point to prospective students. Despite the outward reverence for graduate fellows, the University’s behavior in union contract negotiations indicates scant interest in providing these workers with adequate workplace protections.
In practice, the day-to-day tasks of graduate fellows and graduate research assistants are often identical. For example, in the physical sciences, fellows use the same equipment and resources as the rest of their lab, regardless of appointment. Like Amelia and Alicia, they might collaborate with one another on the same project, sometimes even sharing lead authorship on manuscripts, reflecting their equal contributions.
As academics in training, we know that research is a communal and collaborative craft. The University seems either unable or unwilling to understand this fact, continuing to make arbitrary distinctions between appointments that ignore the realities of graduate workers.
For both graduate research assistants and graduate fellows, advisors are given a tremendous amount of control by the University over their advisees’ livelihoods, with few protections against abuse of authority. For many fellows, continued funding is contingent on their advisor’s approval, just as with the research assistants they work alongside. Throughout bargaining, the University has repeatedly refused to ensure workplace protections for all graduate workers, regardless of appointment.
Recently, the University has attempted to treat fellows as distinct from other graduate workers in multiple ways, such as by excluding them from New Employee Orientations where individuals are informed of their rights as a unionized workforce and are invited to join their union. Moreover, the University has refused to deduct dues from fellows who have joined GLU-UE and authorized union dues to be taken out of their paycheck. Based on these actions, it appears that the University believes that many fellows are not employees, despite both the recent changes to PELRA and the reality of graduate fellow labor.
In the last few weeks, the University has initiated a new, convoluted process to clarify the nature of fellows, intended to stall negotiations and fracture graduate workers.
As graduate workers, we know that we often share many of the same responsibilities, expectations and conditions, regardless of our appointments. All graduate workers, regardless of funding source, advance the mission of this University everyday. Yet, the University insists on disregarding the law, making it more difficult for all graduate workers to secure necessary protections against retaliation, harassment and other abuses of power.
It’s time for the University to stop playing fast and loose with the law and recognize graduate fellows for what they are: employees.
Jonathan and Anshu are area representatives in the Graduate Labor Union Bargaining Committee that has been negotiating a union contract on behalf of graduate workers since September 2023.
