Infants and Children Last: World-Class Failure on Child Care

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Should the university provide affordable infant and child care for students and faculty? This is precisely the question the Office of the Provost asked in 2007 when it commissioned a study to determine the child care needs of UIC students and faculty. At first glance, it may not seem so obvious that a lack of infant and child care options on campus has costs for us all. But, these costs are real, and they come in many forms, from losses in productivity to missed classes and cancelled office hours. This means students get short changed, graduate students take a longer time to finish their degrees, and faculty make less of a contribution to the university.

For graduate students like me with small children at home, things look even bleaker. A lack of child care options means taking on a second job and missing out on department activities. I know, because over the last few years, I’ve had to do both. For the first two years of my son’s life, in an effort to save money, my partner worked full-time and I stayed home three days a week with our son. On days when I would teach, we hired a babysitter; I returned home in the afternoons immediately after I finished teaching, in order to take care of our boy. I also took on adjunct work, teaching evening classes at local university to make extra money. Needless to say, I made almost no progress toward my degree during those years, and I was rarely able to fulfill my teaching duties in the way I believed the job required. There were many times during these years when I contemplated giving up on my degree and staying home full-time with our kids.

Right now I have two children who need care during the day. For my son, who just turned three, we pay $200 a week to have him in a Montessori program near our home. Granted, there are other, cheaper options, like in-home daycares, but they are marginally cheaper (about $25 less per week) and provide less structure and fewer activities for kids.  For our infant son, we pay a student in our neighborhood to watch and care for him in our home for most of the week. This costs us another $400 per week. If my partner didn’t work full time, too, there’s absolutely no way we could pay for the care of our children on my university wages. And, if we didn’t pay for care, there’s absolutely no way we could both have careers. In other words, without having two incomes it would be impossible to raise our children in Chicago on a TA salary.

I want to be clear, though, that I’m not asking the university to raise my kids or provide me with free child care so that I can be a student and my partner can work. What I’m asking for is an affordable on-campus option that’s good for employees, students, and our children. With the number of education, nursing, and social work programs at UIC, it seem entirely possible to provide world class child-care options while also educating the next generation of educators, nurses, and social workers.

And, it appears that I’m not alone when it comes to facing these difficult choices between quality child care and professional obligations. According to UIC’s Ad Hoc Committee on Infant and Child Care, 40 percent of graduate students reported taking an additional job in order to pay for child care costs, while 77 percent reported missing out on opportunities to participate in their departments. This means a degraded academic culture and lost opportunities for all.

According to the same 2007 report mentioned above, providing infant and child care at UIC would “improve recruitment and retention, it would also benefit from increased productivity and a reduction of time lost due to faculty and staff absences related to child-care issues.” Not to mention lower stress levels for 80 percent of graduate students and 70 percent of faculty with infants or small children.

The university’s own report, then, identified the costs of not having affordable infant and child care options available on campus. This same 2007 report made specific recommendations to the Office of the Provost to radically expand infant and child care options at UIC. So, what’s happened? In short, nothing.

To be fair, though, UIC does offer on-campus child care for the children of employees and students—as long as the children are at least two years nine months and fully potty trained and you can afford the cost (about $200 per week for most employees and on a sliding scale for students). On the face of it, we might think this isn’t such a bad deal. After all, there’s at least an on campus option for child care, right? The question, however, for employees like me, is what to do for the first two years and nine months of my child’s life. Is it possible to raise your children and still pursue a professional degree? Let’s just say that it would be far more possible for far more people, if all UIC employees were paid a living wage and if UIC provided affordable care options for all employees and students who need it.

So, what actually happens now that my son has turned the requisite two years and nine months and finally qualifies for the UIC on-camps care? It turns out that there’s a waiting list to get in to the on-campus program. UIC’s child care facility can only accommodate 96 children, while back in 2007 the report noted that demand for child care was topping 400. Where might we put the additional 304 infants and toddlers who can’t be enrolled in our on-campus child care center? One idea: How about the Office of the Provost?

-Brian Charest, TA in the Department of English

***All statistics quoted above are from the Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Infant Care at UIC: http://www.uic.edu/depts/oaa/childcare.html

What is a Union? Part 2

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By Gina Gemmel

Part 2 of a multi-part series

This is part two of a series explaining what a union is.  For the first post, click here. 

With all the talk of austerity going around these days, there are a lot of people who feel uncomfortable making demands of their employers.  We may think that we are being greedy if we demand better pay, especially when so many others are suffering.  Today’s post will explain why such a philosophy is bad for workers in general.  First of all, the gains that union members are able to make are not just for unionized employees.  The 8 hour day/40 hour work week, for example, began as a demand of labor unions, but is now standard practice and required by law for all workers.  For a more concrete example, at UIC, we have three classifications of employees, two of which are in our bargaining unit (TAs and GAs), and one of which is not (RAs). The employees not in the bargaining unit have traditionally been extended most of the benefits of the contract that the bargaining unit negotiates. It would be better for RAs to be in the bargaining unit so they had full protection through grievance processes, but for now, their standard of working conditions has been improved because of a union to which they do not belong (the reason RAs aren’t in the BU is because of an IL law that prohibits them from being in it). Think of how bad UIC would look if they didn’t extend those benefits to the workers not in the bargaining unit who are doing very similar work to those who are in it. The union has created a situation that makes it difficult for the employer to mistreat those employees, even though they could legally.

Second, people seem to think of unions as some sort of exclusive entity that is trying to snatch up all the resources and leave everyone else behind. But in reality, good unions have solidarity with all workers as their core value. We don’t want to get some benefit that causes other workers to go without, and if an employer tried to take away something from other employers because our union negotiated a contract with good benefits, we would support those other workers in unionizing and protesting their unfair treatment. A union’s goal is to use collective action to better working conditions for people who don’t have the power to better their conditions individually. If an employer decides to take something away from other employees as a result of the union’s work, that is the employer’s decision. If I feel like my working conditions have been negatively impacted because my employer apportioned more resources for some employees who have a union than for me, the solution is take the issue up with my employer since that’s the entity that made the decision. It would get me nowhere and would not make sense to take the issue up with the union members who have successfully guaranteed their rights (although this is precisely the thing that would benefit employers most, because if we’re busy being at each other’s throats, we won’t demand accountability from the people who are really responsible).  And the best way to take up an issue with an employer is to do it with other like-minded co-workers at your side. The employer can fire one person demanding rights, but they can’t fire the entire workforce. And that right there is why unions are necessary, and why they are capable of achieving results.

Students or Workers?

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By: Gina Gemmel

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts on what exactly a union is and how a healthy, active union can benefit workers.  But today I want to start by discussing the concept of a “worker.”

Is a graduate employee a worker?  Most graduate students who hold assistantships, whether they work in an office, a classroom, or doing research, consider themselves to be primarily students.  This might be because some grads see themselves more as apprentices than employees, because we associate being an employee with a more structured, 9-5 type of job, or because we are often encouraged by our departments to give most of our attention to our studies.  Whatever the reason, one of the first hurdles to overcome in discussing unions with graduate employees is simply convincing us that we are workers who could benefit from a union.

We are definitely workers, though.  We provide essential services, without which UIC would not be able to operate.  Whether we do research in labs, teach students in classrooms, or work in an office, the university could not keep functioning without the almost 1,400 graduate employees who do work every day.  As an organization, UIC could not keep operations running without the hard work of Graduate Assistants in offices all over campus.  UIC could not sustain its status a research university without Research Assistants performing experiments and supporting the work of faculty members*.  And of course, without Teaching Assistants in classrooms, UIC could not fulfill its mission of educating students.  All of these roles are clearly vital, and they are all roles for which we receive a compensation, which is another critical indicator that we are, in fact, workers.

Graduate students with assistantships perform all of this vital work, and as a result the university is able to continue running.  Acknowledging the work we perform as work has become an important issue in recent years as universities have shifted their labor force toward the contingent end of the spectrum.  According to the US Department of Education, only 27% of instructors were full-time, tenure-track teachers*.  The remaining 73% of instructors were contingent workers, including graduate students and adjuncts.  Not only are we workers; we are doing the work that used to be done by full-time, higher-paid workers – you know, those people we all traditionally consider to be workers!

I will be writing more on this topic in the coming weeks, but the preceding information should not only illustrate why what we do as graduate employees is work, but also why we need to raise our collective voice to influence the direction the university is headed in.  We make up a significant portion of the university workforce, and as such, we should have a say in our own working conditions and the operations of the university.  Unionization is the best way to achieve these things.

*Although the GEO believes that Research Assistants are workers, there is currently a law in IL preventing them from being a part of the bargaining unit of a union.  The GEO would like to see this law overturned in the future so that RAs could take advantage of all the benefits guaranteed to TAs and GAs through the GEO contract.

*http://aft.org/issues/highered/acadstaffing.cfm