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1. THREAD: Posting a piece I co-authored in 2019 with @anacidcommie in @timeshighereducation about the grad student mental health crisis. Below, I review the argument and situate it in context with Covid-19’s impact on people’s mental health: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/unionisation-essential-addressing-graduate-student-mental-health-crisis
2. The article argues for two major theses: first, that the work and organizational context of U.S. research universities is causing the mental health crisis; second, that forming and sustaining graduate-led labor unions at all universities is necessary in addressing the crisis.
3. How did we arrive at these claims? Here’s some background: A 2017 Nature survey found that 39% of graduate students experience moderate to severe mental health problems during graduate school. Other studies corroborate this result, including a 2019 survey update from Nature.
4. Although just 2 out of 5 graduate students experience moderate to severe problems, it is likely that the crisis significantly impacts many more people than that. Stress, anxiety, and depression travel across groups, meaning others within graduate school networks...
5. ...are being impacted to lesser but not insignificant degrees. Even if we haven’t suffered work-related mental distress ourselves, we probably know someone in grad school - a friend, a department colleague - who has.
6. Yet when my co-author and I looked into how university administrations deal with this crisis, we did not find strategies that address it at scale. We read much about individualized solutions: work-life balancing, life-coaching, changing departmental work cultures...
7. ...being mindful, and going to talk therapy. All of these are fine and good things. But we read nothing about significantly altering the overall conditions in which graduate students work. Why not?
8. It’s not because there's no evidence of the systemic nature of the problem. In 2017, Belgian researchers confirmed that factors in the “work and organizational context” of universities cause mental health problems. Among the factors: low job control...
9. ...work-family conflict, high job demands, and economic precarity. Life for many graduate students is economically precarious, time-crunched, hyper-competitive, and low in job control. In other words: many grad students are very strained and unable to make real change.
10. So the solution is obvious, right? Just pay graduate students more and provide better healthcare, decrease pressure on their degree timelines, and let them have more say in what happens to them at work. But do university administrations voluntarily do this? Rarely if ever.
11. In fact, administrators act as if they can deal with the MH crisis while thwarting efforts of grad students to take matters into their own hands – namely, by forming labor unions. They do this even though it is well-documented that workers w/ unions fare than workers w/o.
12. At @EconomicPolicy, they've amassed tons of data on how workers in unions have better pay & benefits and workplace protections. They even have a report specifically on how grad unions benefit their memberships.
13. Indeed, unions can do a lot of things that individualized solutions cannot. One is to give grad students a formal mechanism for asserting job control and binding university administrations to employment contracts that secure longer-term economic stability.
14. Moreover, unions streamline communication between grad students and high-level admins about workplace-organizational issues, making it so that the people most impacted by admin decisions have greater input and collective influence in those decisions.
15. You will have to search far and wide for a uni administration, however, that encourages the unionization or collective-bargaining efforts of its grad students. More likely, you will find them offering sophistical arguments about how graduate research is not really “work."
16. So, it is up to graduate students to self-organize and build the power necessary, through unions as well as various political & legal strategies, to change their workplaces. This will have maximum impact on higher education if it is universalized across the system.
17. Differences between private-sector and public-sector labor law make this task difficult. Many states currently prohibit public employees from bargaining contracts, and many others have right-to-work laws that make it hard to keep a union alive once it is formed.
18. And now, due to the pandemic, still more challenges loom. Admins are hoarding power in the name of financial emergency. The job market for current PhD students is bleak. Public health reqs add social-distancing requirements to already isolating academic workplaces.
19. And, at most universities, especially publics in red states with slim budgets, grad students are not getting funding extensions to make up for time lost when campuses closed. They are just going to have to get the work done, in less time, under more adverse conditions.
20. To be sure, the economic crisis stemming from the pandemic spans beyond what can be achieved in individual collective-bargaining agreements. As existing grad unions are already showing, direct action on a large scale is needed to move things in a more humane direction.
21. We need a serious higher-education bailout in the public sector, and in the private sector, wealthy universities must realign their financial priorities, using their vast endowments to invest in the workers who make universities run.
22. Some unions, like @GradLaborOrg and @WeAreGage, have bargained during the pandemic. Brown’s agreement contains 1-year funding extensions for PhD candidates. To see comparable measures at cash-strapped public unis, more large-scale direct action will undoubtedly be necessary.
23. Coalition building across different levels of academic employment is also a must. This is happening all over: @CAJUArizona, @uicgeo, @UCWCWA, etc. Making common cause with other higher-ed workers is necessary for addressing the deepening mental health crisis.
24. Final thought for now: When we frame the grad student mental crisis as a labor issue, we can see it as linked to systemic problems in higher ed. If we want to intervene meaningfully to alleviate it, we need to work together among ourselves and w/ other campus workers.
25. Forgot to include this up above. Evidence that the pandemic is deepening the MH crisis among grad students is already available from UC-Berkeley's Student Experience Consortium: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02439-6
