Graduate employee unions

At many universities, graduate students are employed by their university to teach classes or do research. While all graduate employees are graduate students, many graduate students are not employees.

MBA students, for example, usually pay tuition and do not have paid teaching or research positions. In many countries graduate employees have collectively organized labor unions in order to bargain a contract with their university. In Canada, for example, almost all graduate employees are members of a CUPE local.

In the United States there are many graduate employee unions at public universities, the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions lists 25 recognized unions at public universities on its website. Private universities, however, are covered under the National Labor Relations Act rather than state labor laws and until 2001 there were no recognized unions at private universities.

Many graduate students see themselves as akin to junior faculty, but with significantly lower pay. Many graduate students feel that teaching takes time that would better be spent on research, and many point out that there is a vicious circle in the academic labor economy.

Institutions that rely on cheap graduate student labor have no need to create expensive professorships, so graduate students who have taught extensively in graduate school can find it immensely difficult to get a teaching job when they have obtained their degree.

Many institutions depend heavily on graduate student teaching: a 2003 report by the Yale graduate student union, for instance, claims that "70% of undergraduate teaching contact hours at Yale are performed by transient teachers: graduate teachers, adjunct instructors, and other teachers not on the tenure track."