University celebrates labor leader but fights against labor unions

By JAMES ESPINOSA / Special to The Collegian

Last week, we celebrated Cesar Chavez and recognized his labor struggles. Fresno State honors Cesar Chavez with a day off. There is also a statue of Chavez, cast in bronze, between the library and the Health and Human Services building.

Graduate students like myself walk past the statue daily as they walk to teach their classes. There are quite a few of us graduate student workers, from graders to tutors to teaching assistants.

When I first was admitted to Fresno State and learned I was going to be a TA, I was very pleased.

Friends of mine, who had gone to other graduate schools, had told me about the perks of programs like teaching assistantships: tuition waivers, health benefits; some even received reduced-cost housing.

But not at Fresno State. Compared to the UC schools, our wages are pitiful. And there are no tuition waivers, nor health benefits. But we do get to pay the university $55 or so for our yellow parking permits.

So now, graduate student workers have formed a labor union, modeled after one already in place in the UC system, and have been fighting for months to establish their first labor contract. It is close to the end of the school year, and the California State University system is not working with us — uncooperative like the grape producers in the late 1960s and early 1970s that Chavez and the United Farm Workers had to deal with.

It is more troubling than money, though. I think about our TA inservice meeting that took place at the beginning of the semester. I remember looking around and wondering where the African American graduate teaching assistants were.

In the English composition program, at least, there is not one. Of course, I cannot blame this solely on our low wages and lack of benefits, but I can almost guarantee that our employment conditions are not fruitful to the cause of diversity.

Fresno State cares about diversity, though. And they care about labor issues. After all, that is why have a holiday for Chavez, isn’t it? That is why Chavez is immortalized in that statue in the middle of the Fresno State campus, right?


—James Espinosa is a graduate student in Fresno
State’s master of fine arts nonfiction program and a
teaching assistant for the English department