Editor’s note: A previous version of this story did not mention that the Student Government Association overturned the presidential veto on an act urging the University of Maryland and University System of Maryland to recognize the Graduate Labor Union. This omission did not meet editorial standards. This story and its headline have been updated.
The University of Maryland SGA overturned a presidential veto on Wednesday on an act calling for this university and the University System of Maryland to recognize graduate student workers’ right to unionize.
The Student Government Association voted 15-4-6 to overturn president Reese Artero’s veto and pass the bill. The act, which SGA’s legislature initially approved 25-1-2 on March 5, stated that undergraduate students’ academic success depends on the “good working conditions of graduate student workers.”
More than 60 percent of graduate workers at this university have signed a union authorization card, according to the Graduate Labor Union, a campus organization that advocates for graduate students’ collective bargaining rights. Unionization would allow graduate student workers to negotiate for a contract and on working conditions, including wages and hours.
Legislation has been introduced in the Maryland General Assembly every session since 2017 to grant graduate student workers at public colleges and universities across the state the right to unionize. Administrators from this university and the university system have testified against the legislation each time, according to GLU’s website.
This university did not immediately provide a comment to The Diamondback.
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GLU organizer Rose Ying told The Diamondback she was disappointed when she heard that the SGA president was going to veto the bill.
The neuroscience and cognitive science doctoral student said undergraduate students should care about graduate students’ working conditions because they often teach and mentor undergraduates.
“We can’t speak up because we’re afraid that we might get fired in retaliation when we can’t get adequate accommodations for disabilities,” Ying said. “That all affects how well we are able to support undergrads.”
Ying said she hopes undergraduate students continue to support graduate workers’ push for collective bargaining rights so administrators stop opposing the GLU.
Artero said in an interview with The Diamondback that her veto was not out of ideological opposition to graduate students’ right to collectively bargain, but rather concern that the union’s demands are not “fiscally responsible for undergraduates.”
Graduate assistant stipends and benefits, including tuition remission and healthcare coverage, are worth on average more than $60,000 each year, university administrators wrote in testimony submitted to the state legislature’s house appropriations committee in 2023.
But Artero said if the university implemented the majority of what the GLU is asking for, the cost for graduate student workers’ benefits and stipends could “shoot up.” The SGA has not talked to GLU about the potential impact of their goals on both undergraduate and graduate students, the senior criminology and criminal justice major added.
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“Who is taking on the financial burden of these things?” Artero said. “[The] university doesn’t have the money for it, so it’s inevitably going to come out of tuition, student fees and other things that both undergrads and graduate students’ pay.”
During Wednesday’s general body meeting, SGA officers and students expressed their opinions on the legislation before Artero’s veto.
Chris Adams, the SGA’s South Campus Commons representative, said paying graduate students more will result in undergraduate students paying more tuition because the money has to come from somewhere.
Adams, a senior government and politics major, said he has to work to stay at this university, and that as a resident assistant, he already gets substantially less benefits than graduate workers.
Siddharth Gupta, the SGA’s off-campus commuter representative, said during the debate that graduate student workers’ right to unionize and collectively bargain is “immutable.”
The senior public health science major said the only way to have conversations about what GLU’s demands mean to undergraduates in an “equitable and fairly represented manner” is to recognize the organization and its right to form a union.
“If we reject the right to unionize, we refuse to acknowledge the injustices that are being done with regards to [graduate workers’] working conditions, their pay, their hours,” Gupta said.
Junior staff writer Lauren Frank contributed to this story.
