At Yale University this past Friday, hundreds of graduate students, joined by union organizers and professors, gathered on the campus to protest Yale's increasing use of graduate students and non-tenure track instructors.

"It seems that people are more concerned about the bottom line than about the academics," says Curtis Z. Mitchell, a second-year graduate student in Yale's mathematics department and chair of Yale's Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO).

This weekend's rally is part of a larger resurgence in union activity by graduate student workers across the nation in the past four years, most in the country's state universities.

With higher-education institutions relying more on teaching assistants (TAs) and part-time faculty to teach undergraduates, graduate students, who serve as these TAs, are fighting to gain rights equal to the work they perform.

Second-Class Employees

The main problem facing graduate students is their exclusion from the employment process, according to Connie M. Razza, a fifth-year graduate student in the English department at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a spokesperson for the Student Association of Graduate Employees-United Auto Workers (SAGE-UAW) at UCLA.

"It's really simply that we do so much of the teaching [in colleges] without having a say in the terms and conditions of the working environment," Razza says.

Because graduate student workers are seldom full-time, they often are not covered by the policies protecting other employees. Mitchell sees "casualization" as the major problem facing Yale and other institutions currently.

Casualization--the increasing use of part-time and contractual labor--is largely responsible for the recent resurgence in the labor movement on college campuses across the United States, according to a GESO study.

"Over the last five years, people have become increasingly aware of casualization where tenure track professors are retiring, and their positions aren't replaced," Mitchell says. "Instead, adjunct teachers and graduate students are being hired to do the same teaching."

As a result of this practice, Mitchell says there is a surplus of Ph.D. candidates because colleges accept more graduate students to teach at reduced salaries but then do not offer them any opportunity for occupational advancement.

Antony Dugdale, a sixth-year student in Yale's philosophy and religion department and GESO member, says practices which adversely affect graduate students also harm undergraduates.

"[Casualization] is a great way for universities to get teaching done by cheap workers," Dugdale says. "This is great for the endowment but not great for the undergraduate. Undergrads should have permanent, stable teachers instead of a fly-by-night workforce."

By providing graduate students with better working conditions, Dugdale says undergraduates would also benefit since graduate students could concentrate on teaching instead of worrying about making ends meet. He also says giving graduate students opportunities for job advancement would help undergraduates since it would provide them with a stable teaching staff.

However, undergraduates are being taught and evaluated more by non-permanent teachers than by full-time faculty. In a study recently released by the GESO, it was reported that nearly 70 percent of undergraduate classroom instruction at Yale is performed by graduate students or adjunct instructors while faculty only perform 30 percent of this instruction.