In days of yore, when people sought the skills necessary to make a living outside of the fields, young men would enslave themselves to a man of skill who would teach them a trade such as blacksmithing, barrel making or perhaps post-hole digging.

Even neophytes would enter into a similar arrangement with older monks, who would teach them the ways of the faith and how to do the job right.

The profit for the apprentice: knowledge and skill. The profit for the master: a slave to do his bidding.

There were no trade schools like we have in our enlightened times. Today’s professional education is not paid for with one’s indentured labor, just cash.

Unless, of course, you are a graduate student.

Graduate students fall through the cracks of normal labor practices. Often bound by the centuries-old “tradition” of apprenticeship, they are used as a cheap form of labor to do the university’s dirty work (i.e teaching enormous classes of undergraduates) while they get their degrees.

Since most graduate students only plan on being graduate students for a short period of time, they put up with peanuts for pay while closing their eyes and praying for the whole thing to be over soon.

Graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are currently trying to get their administration to recognize their employee union.

Iowa State is nowhere near this point, and that is unfortunate.

Anyone who works for a living needs a forum for collective bargaining.

The idea that the administration is going to listen to graduate student concerns about being overworked and underpaid is ludicrous.

No corporation with a vested interest in the bottom line has any reason to shell out more money to its employees unless those employees have the power to speak as a group and, if necessary, withhold their labor if their basic needs are not met.

Granted, graduate students get a lot out of teaching all of the freshmen composition classes, correcting hundreds of papers for their major professors and aiding in someone else’s career-making research.

But when a person comes to Iowa State for an advanced degree and ends up spending 60 hours a week dealing with freshmen spelling errors or cleaning up messes in chem labs in Gilman for $800 to $1,000 per month, the line between student and sweatshop worker gets crossed.

Collective bargaining is a right graduate students should be exercising. Anyone who tells you graduate students do not need unions is undoubtedly profiting at the expense of their labor.

Iowa State Daily Editorial Board: Sara Ziegler, Greg Jerrett, Kate Kompas, Carrie Tett and David Roepke.