Are you saying that agency shop and dues checkoff are required by federal law? This is definitely not so. They have to be negotiated as part of the collective bargaining agreement. But once you have them, you don't have to organize new workers into your union; they have to organize themselves out. Of course, getting workers into a union is only the start of what a union should be doing.
Further: << But those tasks are *not* mere "organizational survival". Those tasks are essential to what a union is. Grad unions don't have the resources to hire huge staff, so we've had to invent our own, low-cost ways of mobilizing people -- everything from department stewards to email lists, to training new folks to handle grievances to community involvement, etc. It's not easy, it's not simple, it can be the most frustrating thing in the world. But you get a long-term payoff: large numbers of union members who develop the skills and training to be leaders themselves. If time-harried, overworked grads can pull this off, other unions can surely do the same. >>
I am in the largest union local in the country, with a rather substantial staff. Yet each school -- NYC has well over 1000 -- has its own chapter leader (our term for shop steward), and each chapter leader is trained not only to do grievances, but also to run an active chapter with regular meetings and newsletters, to do informal problem solving, to interface with parents and PTAs, to access a rather substantial Board bureaucracy, and to be the point person on all sorts of educational, health and safety, technological issues and more. I am glad that you seem to do something like that in the grad unions, but you didn't invent it: it has been good union practice for decades.
And I have been both a graduate student and a full-time teacher in an inner city high school for 14 years, and I have to tell you, there is no comparison. The life of a graduate student is one of complete leisure relative to that of a teacher who teaches over 150 students each and every day, with every social problem you could imagine, and has all the homework, test and papers of those 150 students to grade. When I write this stuff, I am reminded of the old Monty Python routine -- You had a gutter to pull yourself up from??? -- but the notion that the life of a graduate student is difficult could only come from, well, a graduate student. I would kill for the amount of time I had to read and wrote as a graduate student, and devote to all sorts of activism.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --