When did folks first get organized at your school? During the 70s? Later?
In Ohio, it will probably take a campaign strong enough to force a rewriting of the relevant clauses of the Ohio Revised Code through the legislature. A couple of years ago, we called many unions for help; some didn't return our calls; others came, talked with us, and then went away; one of them initially offered to help and then backed off (perhaps after taking a good look at the exclusion clause & calculating how much it would cost to help us organize). The CWA (among the unions we contacted) was the only one that suggested an actual strategy (create a dues-paying organization, and act as a pressure group, whether or not we can hope to gain legal recognition as a collective bargaining unit), which unfortunately didn't appeal to the majority of our groups then. Since then our number has dwindled, and we are sort of back to square one. I suppose such ups and downs are normal for grad union organizing, and I hope we'll be able to get things restarted soon. There is definitely latent discontent (no health benefits, no formal grievance procedures, high attrition rates, etc.) and interest in unionization here; it's just that not enough have yet to come forward and volunteer as _organizers_. Speaking personally, I regret that I haven't been able to pay as much attention to this issue since I exhausted my TA funding and started working as lecturer (which comes with zero job security _and_ less pay, as you know, so I have to teach more courses per quarter; also, I am here on my F-1 visa, which doesn't allow me to work off-campus). A year & half ago, a friend of mine (in Art Hisotry at a branch campus) and I called a meeting of adjuncts, but only a few came (recently I learned that one of them was an old comrade of Patrick Bond's -- it's a small leftist world!), and we couldn't expand from there.
>Of course, working conditions are very
>different for grads, adjuncts and profs, so three separate organizations
>may be appropriate.
Most likely. Cary Nelson writes in _Academic Keywords_: "At CUNY, the part-timers won medical coverage only after they mounted a union decertification drive" (207).
Lastly, while organizing is fundamentally important, both in itself and as a leftist building block, it will take more than unionization of grads & adjuncts to reverse the increase of adjuncts and the decrease of tenure-track jobs. As long as even unionized grads & adjuncts are much cheaper than tenure-track professors, there just aren't enough incentives for institutions to change their hiring policies. It will take more than collective bargaining to level this monstrously multi-tiered hierarchy.
Yoshie