This summer, Tiggy McLaughlin won an hours-related grievance for work as a GSI in a Spring 2013 semester course. We asked her to share her experience with the grievance process and her advice for fellow grad employees who suspect they are being over-worked.
In brief, what was the situation and how did you know that you might have a grievance on your hands?
I was teaching a Spring Term course at a .5 fraction that was exactly half as long as a semester course, but still a full semester’s worth of credits for the students. Therefore, the syllabus had them doing a full semester’s worth of work–the standard complement of two exams and three 3-5 page papers–which I fully agree with from a pedagogical standpoint. From the standpoint of a GSI, however, that meant I had to do a full semester’s worth of grading in half the time. It was pretty clear to me by the second week that I would have an hours grievance once the grading started piling up, but I waited until around week four when my actual logged hours accounted for more than an average of 20 hours per week before going to GEO to file a grievance.
Did you have any apprehensions about going to GEO or filing a grievance?
I did not really have any apprehensions about filing this hours grievance because I didn’t have an issue with the professor teaching the course or the course itself. My issue was structural: If the course required that the students do the same amount of work in a half-term as they do in a full term, then the GSI was going to work more hours per week in the half-term than in the full-term. In my case, the amount of hours per week I worked on average over the course of the half-term was 22, two more than the 20 which is max for a .5 appointment. When I went to the professor in Step 1 and he did not change the workload, I knew that I was just going to GEO to try and get paid for the extra hours I was working. There was no emotion, no grudges involved, and no hard feelings between me and the professor.
Were there any challenges in the grievance process, or things you would do differently if you had to do it again?
There were no real challenges during the grievance process, in part because I had tracked my hours so thoroughly and made every effort to do work efficiently, even to the point of doing all the course readings during lecture and office hours. The GEO staff members and the grievance committee member who represented me were all very helpful and the entire process went smoothly. The only thing that caught me off guard was that at the Step Two meeting, the department chair said I should have come to her first. I had no response. It had never crossed my mind to talk to her–I knew that the grievance procedure began with telling the professor that you’re working over hours to see if he or she changes your work load, and then if your workload stays the same, to go to GEO for a Step Two grievance. In a small department where the chair knows me by name, this started to feel personal and I wondered whether I did the right thing. When I thought about it later, I realized that I absolutely did do the right thing–talking to the department chair would have been going over the head of my professor, and then there might have been hard feelings, or it might have made the grievance process more difficult. This was not a department issue–this was a work issue.
We’re halfway through the semester. What advice would you give to someone who thinks they might have an hours related grievance this term?
TRACK YOUR HOURS! I could not stress this enough. Prior to the Spring Term when I filed this grievance, I had GSI’d for four courses in which I meticulously kept track of my hours. It’s just a good practice to get into the habit of doing. It not only safeguards against going over hours and lets you know when you may have a grievance on your hands, it also helps you manage your own time better, both within your GSI appointment and between your GSI appointment and work as a graduate student.
More people might be more willing to file grievances if they knew that they’d get compensation or help with their workload instead of just proving a point. On the other hand, people might avoid grievances because they don’t want to seem like money-grubbers. Would you be OK with sharing what your compensation was?
I got around $911. And they taxed it at the highest amount, so I only saw about $650 of it. But whatever, less taxes for me to pay in April. I certainly don’t think that’s a high enough figure to make it seem like GEO people just grieve to get extra money. I could make $911 much easier by taking up a part-time job on the side. $911 is the difference between a .5 and a .6 fraction for a Spring Term course, and unless the prof wants to re-design the course for next year with fewer papers and tests, the GSI appointment for that course should definitely be a .6.
You have a right to receive wages for the hours you work just like any other job, and GSIs who track their hours carefully are almost always successful in pursuing grievances. If you think you might be working more hours than you’re being paid for, email the Grievance Committee at grrr@geo3550.org.
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