Students wage union fight.

• Author: Hickey, Maria
• Position: Graduate students

Iowa City From Yale to Berkeley, graduate students are taking part in a nationwide movement to organize unions at their universities. Although nine such unions already exist, the process often takes years of hard work and frustration. At the University of Iowa, however, graduate students have sailed smoothly through a one-year campaign that will culminate in an election on April 12 and 13. More than 2,500 of the 6,500 graduate students at the university will be eligible to vote. Teaching, research, and law assistants, as well as Saturday evening instructors, will decide whether they want a union to represent them at the Iowa state legislature, where the university has tried unsuccessfully for the past three years to gain funding for graduate-student benefits.

"I went to the first meeting never thinking we'd be where we are now. It still surprises me," says Mark Stemen, a history teaching assistant at the University of Iowa who has been actively involved in the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students since it formed in April 1993.

Stemen and his wife Terri were forced to go on welfare last year when they found out they were going to have their first baby. Even though Terri worked and Mark held two jobs besides teaching and taking classes at the university, they needed Medicaid to pay the prenatal and delivery costs. To Mark and many others who don't fit the traditional mold of the young and single graduate student, child care, health benefits, and tuition waivers are important issues.

"Money is tight and graduate students are getting really nervous," he says. "Unions provide an anchor in a stormy sea."

In the year leading up to the election, Campaign members spent hours recruiting, raising money, and researching legal procedures. In early September, the graduate students, organization affiliated with Service Employees International Union and became known as COGS/SEIU Local 150...