At Yale University this past Friday, hundreds of graduate students, joined by union organizers and professors, gathered on the campus to protest Yale's increasing use of graduate students and non-tenure track instructors.

"It seems that people are more concerned about the bottom line than about the academics," says Curtis Z. Mitchell, a second-year graduate student in Yale's mathematics department and chair of Yale's Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO).

This weekend's rally is part of a larger resurgence in union activity by graduate student workers across the nation in the past four years, most in the country's state universities.

With higher-education institutions relying more on teaching assistants (TAs) and part-time faculty as opposed to full-time faculty to teach undergraduates, graduate students, who serve as these TAs, are fighting to gain rights equal to the work they perform.

Second-Class Employees

According to Connie M. Razza, a fifth-year graduate student in the English department at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a spokesperson for the Student Association of Graduate Employees-United Auto Workers (SAGE-UAW) at UCLA, the main problem facing graduate students is their exclusion from the employment process.

"It's really simply that we do so much of the teaching [in colleges] without having a say in the terms and conditions of the working environment," Razza said.

Because graduate student workers are seldom full-time, they often are not covered by the policies protecting other employees. Mitchell sees "casualization" as the major problem facing Yale and other institutions currently.

Casualization--the increasing use of part-time and contractual labor--is largely responsible for the recent resurgence in the labor movement on college campuses across the United States, according to a GESO study.