From Marcus Johnson, Assistant Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park and a member of AAUP-AFT.
This year, University System of Maryland graduate workers and faculty are once again backing legislation that would recognize collective bargaining (CB) rights for graduate assistants, faculty librarians, full-time and part-time faculty. When the National Labor Relations Act (1935) established the right for workers to collectively bargain with their employers, public sector workers were explicitly excluded. A number of states passed legislation to extend these rights to all public sector workers. States like Maryland, however, have taken a piecemeal approach to public sector CB rights.
In 2001, Maryland recognized CB rights for public employees, but this legislation excluded graduate students and faculty. In an effort spearheaded by organized graduate workers since the early 2000s, graduate students and faculty have used the Maryland State Legislature’s annual 90-day session to advocate for legislation that would change this unjust status quo. In each of these efforts, the University System of Maryland (USM) has paid lobbyists to wage a counter-campaign to spread misinformation about the faculty and graduate workers’ pay and benefits and their working conditions. Last year, as in past years, the USM counter-mobilization successfully killed our CB bill before it made it out of committee.
Maryland is not alone in this sense. Faculty and graduate students in public university systems in 34 states currently do not have collective bargaining rights. But this has not stopped the efforts of graduate students and faculty to build a wall-to-wall coalition to organize campus workers here in Maryland, and in states like Arizona, Louisiana, South Carolina and Virginia.
On January 10, the Maryland General Assembly (MGA) began its ninety-day session. Graduate workers, part-time and full-time faculty, and librarians are once again making our voices heard, especially in the State Senate where our bill has historically faced the stiffest opposition. This year, we take hope that our collective efforts will produce a different outcome. In collaboration with UAW and AFT, we are building our organizing presence across the 11 USM campuses. From our growing list of co-sponsors in the House and Senate chambers, we take the signal that our bill can pass this year, should it make it to a vote among the full MGA membership. But if we’ve learned one thing from the successful campaign to win CB for Maryland’s community college faculty in 2021, from last year’s tremendous contract wins at public institutions (like Rutgers and the University of New Mexico), our path to victory will come through organizing our campus and raising public awareness for our fight!