Graduate students working as teaching and research assistants at Loyola University Chicago have voted by a modest margin to unionize, marking one of the first grad student union elections since a major federal ruling concluded they are employees.
A ballot count Wednesday at the National Labor Relations Board’s Chicago regional office revealed 59 percent of the 120 votes cast were in favor of joining Service Employees International Union Local 73, according to the union. About 210 graduate students who are part of the bargaining unit were eligible to vote.
The election is decided by the majority of ballots that are cast, though the union will represent all 210 in the unit, which includes all part-time and full-time grad students who work as teaching assistants, research assistants, program assistants and fellowship teachers at Loyola’s College of Arts and Sciences, except those in the theology department.
Yelyzaveta DiStefano, 23, a first-year graduate student in Loyola’s applied social psychology Ph.D. program who voted to unionize, said she hopes it is a step toward better wages.
DiStefano, who works as a research assistant and teaching assistant, said she has run out of money between paychecks, has had to rely on her partner to buy groceries and has had her cellphone cut off three times since starting the job last year because she didn’t pay the bill. She said she earns $2,000 a month before taxes for nine months of the year.
“No one should be having to face the situation of not meeting their basic needs,” DiStefano said. Another major concern for grad students is health insurance, which the university does provide, but DiStefano said the coverage and copays are not good.
In a written statement after the vote count, John Pelissero, Loyola’s provost and chief academic officer, said that “it is unfortunate that such a small percentage of the voting group determined the outcome for so many others.”
He continued: “While we are disappointed with the result, we will work through the NLRB’s processes and procedures to bargain a contract for the represented graduate assistants through SEIU Local 73.”
The university had urged graduate students to consider the drawbacks of unionizing in a series of communications over the past two months. It cited union dues that could cost 1.5 to 2 percent of their compensation, SEIU’s limited experience in higher education and the fact that students’ individual needs could be overlooked when stipends, benefits and other terms of the working relationship are bargained by the union.
“It is your right to unionize,” Pelissero said in a note in January. “However, we believe that maintaining a direct working relationship with you — without interference from an organization like SEIU Local 73, which may not understand our University, mission, or values — gives our University, faculty, graduate assistants, and other students the best opportunity to build on the improvements that we have made and will continue to make.”
But DiStefano said that direct relationship, in her experience, did not exist.
“I’ve never spoken to an administrator, I’ve never had the chance to air any of these grievances, I had no say in the contract,” she said.
Loyola also stressed that it was committed to improving its relationship with graduate assistants, acknowledging feedback on “a number of topics, including the health insurance plan, available funding (i.e. for conferences), and the feeling that the roles and responsibilities that graduate assistants are asked to take on are not properly recognized and respected by the University as a whole,” Pelissero said in another note to students posted to the university’s website. “If we have fallen short, I apologize.”
The Jesuit university had argued at an NLRB hearing in December that it should not be under the agency’s jurisdiction on religious freedom grounds because “we have the right to define our own mission and govern our institution in accordance with our values and beliefs, free from government entanglement.” The NLRB rejected that position.
Loyola is now among three private universities in the nation with graduate student unions and the first to be represented by the SEIU.
New York University recognized its own grad student union voluntarily in 2013.
A handful of union elections have been held since a major NLRB decision in August that grad students are employees covered by federal labor laws, a reversal of a prior decision from 2004.
Columbia University grad students in New York, whose petition to form a union kicked off the case that led to the NLRB’s decision, voted overwhelmingly in December to join the United Auto Workers, which now represents 3,500 Columbia grad students.
A vote among grad students at Harvard University in Cambridge to join the UAW was too close to call.
Duke University grad students are in the midst of a mail-in election.
Graduate students are the latest focus of organizing efforts in higher education. Private universities have seen a surge of union drives for part-time adjuncts and full-time nontenured faculty, much of it driven by SEIU.
aelejalderuiz@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @alexiaer
