I am not a Machine: Unions Don’t Corrupt Mentorship, Exploitation Does.

/ HELU Blog

A response to Evan D. Morris, “Postdocs Aren’t Burger Flippers: Why Unionization Is a Bad Idea” in Inside Higher Ed.

by Tessa Barber, M.A.

I am a graduate student. I am an employee of my university. One of those identities does not supersede the other. Instead, they live in tandem. My institution expects me to switch those roles like hats when they justify why I deserve labor rights in some cases but not in others. The claim that graduate assistants and postdocs don’t “need” unions because our relationship to our supervisors is one of mentorship rather than employment is not new. This backward framing has reared its ugly head on a number of occasions. It’s the reason postdoc and graduate student employee labor has whipsawed between “employee” and “non-employee” status under the NLRB for decades, leaving workers’ basic protections hostage to definitional disputes.

Postdoctoral and graduate student workers are exactly that: workers. While we may learn as students in the same classrooms in which we teach and we are supposed to receive valuable mentorship from our supervisors, the institutions for whom we work do not differentiate between a worker with a mentor and a worker with a boss, even if you (or faculty supervisors of graduate or postdoc workers) do. If we are exploited by our dissertation or research supervisors in the workplace, the mentorship relationship between us is inherently corrupted. These relationships are built on trust and mutual respect: if a supervisor is exploiting us in the workplace in the name of learning and progress, they neither trust nor respect us, and vice versa.

It is not workers organizing against exploitation that corrupts mentorship, but the exploitation itself. A union does not introduce that rupture, it responds to one that already exists. If graduate or postdoc workers are unionizing, it is not apt to criticize the fact that they did not consult their supervisors for their thoughts on the matter, but it is apt to ask why they didn’t feel safe enough to talk to them about it as their mentor. If a mentorship relationship is dependent upon one party being able to exert their supervisory status to exploit the other’s labor without recourse or intervention from a union, the very foundation of that relationship is not sound and arguably should not be considered a mentorship relationship in the first place. I am not claiming that all supervisory or mentorship relationships between postdoctoral or graduate workers is unhealthy or unsound, but when research supports the claim that more than 50% of all doctoral students feel that their mentorship relationships with their supervisors are unhealthy (Tuma et al., 2021), it is not only critical but necessary to reevaluate our preconceptions about mentorship in the academic workplace.

I frequently hear faculty members, administrators, and university leaders recount the hardships they faced as graduate students and laud them as formative and essential for growth into the hardened scholar they consider themselves to be today. During a public meeting with graduate students, my own university president stated that our graduate assistant stipends were not expected to be livable, that we were expected to just penny pinch and take out loans because that’s what he did as a graduate student and he turned out just fine.

Imagine how much greater graduate and postdoc workers’ academic contributions would be if we did not have to worry where our next rent payment would come from or when our next meal would be. Imagine how much we could learn and how much we could grow our relationships with our peers and supervisors if we didn’t have to work multiple jobs or drown in student debt to bring our research to fruition. Imagine how much richer our academic communities would be if the financial barrier to higher education was torn down. Talk about diversity of perspective.

Evan D. Morris claims that the allure of a postdoctoral fellowship (or in my case, a graduate program) is not the salary or the job stability but the opportunity to learn in the footsteps of those academic giants who walked so we might run. What he fails to consider is that economic conditions today mean that graduate school and postdoctoral fellowships are an impossibility for many who do not have generational funds, to those who are not willing to sink into unsurmountable student debt, or to those who are unwilling to suffer paycheck-to-paycheck for years in the hopes of securing a stable tenured faculty position before their fortieth birthday.

In today’s day and age, being “tight on funds” as an academic worker doesn’t mean just renting that smaller apartment for a while or cooking at home more rather than dining at out, it means that many of us need to sell our blood at plasma banks or live in our cars, offices, or unsafe housing to get by while in graduate school. It means that we may not know where our next meal will come from or how we will pay our rent next month. It means working 60+ hour weeks across multiple jobs – in addition to our academic work – to pay the bills and relying on credit cards and food pantries to feed ourselves. But please, remind me again about the options we have to drop out of our programs and throw away years of research and labor if the going gets too tough to survive.

Additionally, to say that “The value of a good postdoctoral fellowship is not to be measured in salary but in the opportunity to learn at the feet of, yes, a master” and “the poorly treated postdoc is not without options. He is not an indentured servant. If worse comes to absolute worst, he can leave the lab” in the same breath not only ignores the material and immediate needs of the worker as an individual and a human being, but it also neglects to consider the effect of such financial barriers on access to graduate education and postdoctoral fellowships. Are we to deny access to these valuable experiences and opportunities to those who cannot afford to make peanuts for multiple years simply because they cannot afford to survive on promises? Should we as academics proliferate a culture of exorbitant student debt in exchange for degrees and immaterial experience instead of supporting the offering of livable wages to the workers who run our institutions?

I am not a machine, but as a graduate worker I am often treated as one. We are asked to work very long hours, often more than we are paid for. The lines between personal work and employee duties is often blurry. We are paid very little and often have very few benefits, but we produce massive profit for our institutions. We precariously balance our student responsibilities, employee duties, and personal obligations at great personal sacrifice. And we do all of this with very little praise or incentive because within this structure it is systematic, it is expected.

It is not our unions that “commoditize” our labor, as Morris argues; the universities have already done that. At my institution alone, our research enterprise brought in more than $750 million in contracts and grants last year, revenue generated substantially through the tireless work of graduate assistants, postdocs, adjuncts, and faculty members (both contingent and tenured) who are paid a fraction of its value. Framing the arrangement between faculty supervisors and postdocs or graduate student workers as a “character-building” apprenticeship while ignoring the systemic positioning of postdocs and graduate workers as underpaid, high-stakes contingent labor not only obscures who actually benefits from this structure, but it pits two allied populations against one another. Faculty and postdocs/grads are not diametrically opposed parties, either in union or nonunion workplaces; we are both ultimately exploited by the institutions for whom we work. It is the work of our unions and our collective action together that helps secure our research, our work, and our institutions as a public good rather than a commodity.

To quote an earlier article from Morris published in Inside Higher Ed in 2024, students (and postdocs) should seek mentors who look out for them (Morris, 2024). Part of truly effective mentorship and looking out for mentees includes protecting them from exploitation in the workplace, and understanding why the current system of exploitation systematically imposed upon contingent academic labor today might push them to unionize in order to protect themselves from exploitation. All of this to say, if the premise of modern academic mentorship hinges on the mentee’s willingness to accept exploitative conditions without fighting back, that is not an argument against postdoc and grad unionization, it’s an argument for it.

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