Graduate students who work as assistant instructors, teaching assistants and research assistants at UT are also state employees. Hundreds of us belong to the Texas State Employees Union. We prepare and teach undergraduate classes, administer graduate and undergraduate workshops and study sessions, grade the majority of student work and assist students during and outside of office hours. Officially, we are paid for 20 hours per week, but any given week, some of us are working close to full-time hours.
We love our jobs and our students, but understand that like all state employees, we are at the whim of larger forces that determine budgets, funding, pay and benefits. This is why graduate employees organize.
We do receive tuition assistance, though not a full-tuition waiver. We do receive the same health benefits as full-time faculty and staff — benefits we almost lost in 2003.
Unfortunately, part-time lecturers did lose health coverage due to the state budget deficit. This is why we organize.
The 81st Texas Legislature will convene in January. Our economy is in decline. Texas depends on sales and business taxes to significantly fund its budget. If those revenues fall short, legislators will start looking for places to cut back, beginning with our meager pay, benefits and funding provided to UT, which has proportionally dropped by 65 percent since the early 1970s.
The union is working with the Graduate Student Assembly to extend employee health benefits to graduate students on fellowships; many decline fellowships because they will lose their health coverage. If UT wants to remain competitive, it cannot have graduate students deciding between fellowships and health care. The union is fighting to restore health care coverage for part-time lecturers. It is unfair that lecturers must pay for their health care on a part-time salary or go to the emergency room. UT lecturers need to join us in our organized efforts to win back health care coverage.
The union is also fighting for an across-the-board pay raise for all UT employees: staff, faculty, lecturers and graduate employees. We were removed from the last two across-the-board state employee pay raises.
We are fighting to protect full-time employee retirement benefits, to win domestic partner benefits for all UT employees and to institute a full-tuition waiver. Nearly every other major public institution in the country provides full-tuition waivers to working graduate students.
These are all issues of competition and competency. If UT and the state of Texas want to build the kind of first-class research and higher-education institution they espouse, it needs a real commitment, just like our nationally renowned football program received.
This is why we organize. The union’s legislative agenda will have a greater chance of success if all UT employees get on board.
O’Connor is a masters candidate of public affairs and a mechanical engineering teaching assistant.
