And the way the courts in the US run doesn't really work with teaching assistants and other grad employees.
Where I was a teaching assistant, we had a union. This was in the late '80s. Mostly we were hired, given our textbooks, and told to go forth and teach. We had office hours. We kept track of our time. And at the end of the semester we turned in our hours and the following semester our hours were changed to reflect the time we put in. That class that you got paid for as though it took 10 hours/week to teach, but you put in 11? Your job classification was changed to be 11. You put in 21 hours? They take away responsibilities to get you down to 20. You signed up for graduate credit, but it was to make sure that you had time to teach without losing full-time status.
Where I went for my PhD, we had no union. Early '90s, different state. TAs were hired, almost always for 10 hours/week. That got you free health care and a tuition waiver. That put you in class teaching 5 hours a week. A couple of hours/week for office hours. You graded papers. Then the woman in charge of the TAs intervened. You gave practice lessons. You submitted materials for use, and after she was done they were passed out. You reviewed other students' materials for use. You used them, and gave feedback on what did and didn't work--and got feedback on how to make them work. She monitored you in the classroom. Went over videos of your teaching. Pulled in your students to see how it was going and what they thought you could do better. Half of her job was monitoring and training TAs, and she was entirely hands on. Even when you were teaching, you were a student, and when you got credit for that class there was a paper requirement and other grades that went into your "teaching assistant grade." You put in more than 10 hours/week for that 10 hrs/week job. The teaching materials you developed went into the textbook she was writing; she was an author, but it was an open secret that she just drafted the final versions and materials were prepared by students under her supervision. It's a standard textbook now.
Exceptional students she'd hire back for a second year; some students only taught with her for a term. It was financial aid, but it was a course. But since teaching was training and expected for jobs, everybody pretty much got a shot at being a TA and the dept. had a good hiring rate for new grads. This was explained to union reps. The union reps told the students they were brainwashed and had no idea what they really thought. Outsplaining, par excellence. "I know what you think better than you do, so think like me to be true to yourself. Heil Marx."
The TA coordinator wasn't a PhD. I'm not sure she had her masters. But when she got a better job offer, she got tenure at a Tier 1 research university. The university thought she was so good, so essential, that they made an exception for her.
That school, as I was leaving, was given a union. Suddenly tenure mattered: She had to give a reason for not hiring back TAs, and that could be appealed. Within 3 years, there were 10 students with no teaching experience and some students with 2-3 years. They couldn't work extra hours, so the training portion, the group meetings, had to vanish. If she gave them a bad evaluation they could appeal it and it had to be documented--before she'd give them a bad evaluation, they'd video themselves and remedy the problem. Now there was a grievance procedure. Before they got help developing materials; now, if they didn't have time or the ability to do so, they were to be given copies of the worksheets for distribution. (Heck, even teaching high school if you can't make up and tailor your own assignments, you suck as a teacher. This was just encouraging crappy university teaching.)
She had to go from having the TAships be pedagogy classes to having a separate pedagogy class, but that quickly hit 20+ people and was divorced from any practicum. And, yes, the hire rate fell: Those who had lucked out when the union started had years of experience and were snapped up. The rest were going against graduates who'd taught. They floundered. Moreover, since TAs were now employees, she started to interview them for the job. To keep the problems to a minimum, they were hired for 20 hours a week; 1/2 the number of tuition waivers and such were handed out. The TAships became a job; she was unhappy, the students were unhappy.
The unionization drive was driven by two kinds of people: Those from a couple of departments that were like my first school. It didn't apply to much of campus, but they refused to know that. And ideologues, who needed to feel like a worker even if they were getting their PhD in 13th century Japanese thought. It was also funny: There was an election, which was open to everybody and billed as a "do you want to have a union?" They'd work on issues later, and everybody was told that it wasn't the official vote. It was a survey. Vote often if you want to. Then there was a meeting to ratify the vote. It was scheduled, and had a rolling vote tally: You could come, vote, leave. The two hour meeting went on for almost 5 hours before they finally decided they had a quorum of votes; the 20 people in the auditorium took a vote to make "quorum" mean "those who had been present at any point." No roll was kept. Then, a year or two later, the state legislature recognized the union on a party line vote and told the university to recognize it, that it had to be in place for a minimum of X years before a revote petition would be allowed, and during any election the group pushing for decertification had to bear the cost of the election and, if it lost, reimburse the union for any and all costs the union had in defending itself.
For my first school, I don't know how it worked before there was a union, but since it was a job the union was appropriate. At the second school, the union destroyed a really good mentorship and training program and made the graduate students from junior faculty being trained to be good teachers into half-time factory workers. It reduced financial aid for the grad students. And it created a series of overcompensating junior union officials, half popinjay and half martinet, with the worst qualities of each.
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