Some Republicans in favor of the bill argue mixing union activity with an educational environment is not appropriate for students.

This bill was passed too quickly, without Senate contemplation and rationalization, and the state lacks a legitimate reason for being against the forming of any college unionization, research assistants in particular.

MSU’s Graduate Employees Union, or GEU, currently has a union contract that only covers teaching assistants. Research assistants have the option of becoming a paying member of GEU, but they currently are not covered by the contract.

If the state is fine with teaching assistants unionizing, it is unclear why state officials are against research assistants doing the same.

Members of graduate unions are primarily students, not workers. The makeup of each union presumably changes every few years, taking into account the students who graduate and leave the union. They are not like unions in private industries, where its employees stay in the union for 15 or 20-plus years.

In some unions under private organizations, workers fight maliciously for higher pay and fewer hours. If they go on strike, it will impact their place of employment, but it is different for graduate student unions.

Graduate unions likely won’t be trying to leverage their services for anything drastic, mostly because they don’t have very much leverage. If they strike, it won’t have a great impact on the university. For example, the GEU helps graduate student employees who are not getting paid, offers resources to direct students toward a successful graduate career and fights for benefits such as tuition waiver credits.

It is unlikely the state government will see graduate student unions organizing any drastic campaigns against universities.

Although it is unclear how the bill would affect MSU, it puts the GEU in a bad place. Because of its unique graduate student union structure, the bill would prohibit the GEU from expanding its union in the future. It would be confined to keeping membership and full benefits available only for teaching assistants. This bill could have a long-term impact on the GEU and future MSU graduate students.

“This is someone’s bad idea about how to reduce the number of unions in the state,” State Rep. Mark Meadows, D-East Lansing told The State News in a recent article (“Bill passes to strip some graduate students of right to unionize” SN 2/22). “This is a solution in search of a problem.”

Hopefully, the House will take a further look into the bill before passing it as quickly as the Senate did. The bill creates many unnecessary problems for graduate research students.