Last week, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy stepped into the battle over efforts to unionize graduate students at the University of Michigan. The Mackinac Center’s Legal Foundation filed a brief in support of Melinda Day, a U-M graduate student research assistant who objected to being compelled to join the Graduate Employees’ Organization.
A divided Board of Regents voted along partisan lines in favor of GSRA unionization last May, following months of heated debate among students, teachers, and administrators. GEO, the union that represents graduate student teachers (GSIs), supported the push to expand unionization to graduate student researchers. But Day—who had been unionized under GEO during her previous work as an instructor—didn’t want to join the union again.
She wasn’t alone in her view. The two Republican members of the U-M Board of Regents also opposed GSRA unionization. So did President Mary Sue Coleman.
“I do not see research assistants as our employees but as our students,” Coleman said in a statement.
And as the Mackinac Center pointed out in its brief, existing state law also favors Day’s position. The Michigan Employment Relations Committee ruled in 1981 that GSRAs at U-M were students, not employees, and could not be unionized under GEO.
“This matter concerns an issue that has been settled in Michigan for three decades — that Graduate Student Research Assistants are not public employees and therefore cannot participate in mandatory collective bargaining,” the brief states.
For Patrick Wright, director of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, the rule of law is at stake in the unionization debate.
“This case has already been decided and nobody is enforcing it,” he said.
Though Coleman also opposes unionization for GSRAs, the university administration has yet to take a position on the Mackinac Center’s brief. Kelly Cunningham, a university spokesperson, said that U-M was still processing the information.
“The university was notified of the pleadings and is reviewing the material from the Mackinac Center,” she said.
Opponents of GSRA unionization see key differences between graduate student instructors and researchers. For Coleman, this difference stemmed from personal experience.
“When I was a graduate student, I did not see myself as working for the university and I did not see my faculty mentor as my employer,” Coleman said, according to The Michigan Daily. “Far from it. He was my mentor, my tutor and my colleague as I progressed in my course of study.”
GEO’s practices are also a concern to some. Day was troubled by the types of medical coverage offered by the union.
“I can get a sex change operation but I can’t go visit a chiropractor and have that covered,” she said, according to an interview with Kathy Hoekstra, a Mackinac Center communications specialist.
MERC has 10 days to respond to the motion to halt GSRA unionization. If the committee doesn’t comply, the Mackinac Center will consider further legal action.
“We’ll see how the union and the university respond and then what MERC decides to do with it,” Wright said.
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