Saying they can barely afford rent, graduate students from Maryland’s public universities asked lawmakers Tuesday for the right to unionize to negotiate better pay, workloads and benefits.

“The state comptroller signs my paychecks, and I pay employee deductions,” Devin Ellis, a graduate student in public policy at the University of Maryland, told the House Appropriations Committee.

“If that’s not an employee-employer relationship, I don’t know what is.”

In addition to paying most of their 20-hour-a-week paychecks on rent, graduate students at UMd. work 29 hours a week, said Laura Moore, president of the graduate student body at UMd.

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This leads to half of graduate students dropping out, unable to juggle their intense workloads as teaching or research assistants with their $14,000-to-$18,000 stipends, students said.

But university officials and other graduate students from UMd. and University of Maryland, Baltimore County, oppose unionizing, arguing that it would strain relations between faculty and students.

“The relationship between a student and a professor is a special relationship, and I don’t want to change it to employer-employee one,” said UMd. Provost Nariman Farvardin, who pledged to build more graduate student housing and raise stipends.

“I would like to be able to work with students to implement these plans, rather than negotiate them.”

Jessy Warner-Cohen, president of the Graduate Student Association at UMBC, said students there already enjoy a great working relationship with administrators when airing complaints.

“My predecessors have worked hard to build collaborative partnerships, but a union undercuts those relationships and brings uncertainty to campus,” she said.

Some lawmakers appeared receptive to the idea of graduate student unions, which exist at Rutgers University, University of Michigan and University of California at Berkeley, among other schools.

Del. Charles Barkley, D-Montgomery, said he thought the bill’s detractors actually supported it instead when they described their preference for collaborative problem solving.

“That’s exactly what collective bargaining is all about,” he said.

kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com