Victory cries rang out across
campus the night of December 11. Tears of joy were shed.
The American Arbitration
Association had just announced that New York University graduate employees had
voted 98.4 percent in favor of union representation—after eight years of struggle
for recognition.
This makes NYU once again the
only private university with unionized graduate employees.
The Graduate Student
Organizing Committee/Science and Engineers Together (GSOC-UAW)—which brings
together two organizing drives across NYU’s campuses—is affiliated with the
United Auto Workers and includes more than 1,200 graduate employees.
“We hope this inspires
graduate employees at all universities to organize for their rights,” said
Brady Fletcher, a PhD student in Cinema Studies.
GSOC and UAW made history in
2000 when they won a precedent-setting case that recognized graduate students
as employees under national labor law. The decision set off a wave of
organizing at private universities.
But administrators quickly
allied against graduate employee unions—and Brown University, with support from
several major private universities, won an appeal that overturned NYU’s case in
2005, under the Bush National Labor Relations Board.
In its decision, the NLRB
reasoned that the labor performed by graduate assistants was part of an
educational process, over which faculty and administrators should maintain
control. The principle of equality of bargaining power, the Board ruled, was
ill-suited to the realm of higher education.
With employers no longer
legally obligated to recognize graduate employee unions, unionization attempts
at many schools were quickly busted. Organizing committees disbanded. Ballots
from a union vote at Columbia University were impounded. And NYU—which had
settled a first contract with its graduate employees in 2001—refused to bargain
another contract.
In fall 2005, NYU graduate
workers decided—by an 85 percent majority—to strike to demand recognition.
Determined to break the union, the administration threatened international
students, spied on faculty emails, and refused to rehire anyone who didn’t
leave the picket line.
The strike was called off in
May 2006, but graduate employees continued to organize and demand recognition.
A Wake-Up Call
For the last eight years,
graduate employees at NYU have been living with the consequences of not having
a union. Fletcher says employees lost a voice just as health care costs
increased sharply, new fees were imposed, and tuition remission was withdrawn
for some.
In an era when universities
are adopting corporate logic—replacing tenured professors with contingent
adjunct faculty, pushing skyrocketing tuition fees onto undergraduates, and
concentrating power in administration hands—graduate worker unionization
represents “a clear path to making universities less exploitative,” said
Kaitlin Noss, a PhD student in American Studies.
Some public universities have
long had graduate employee unions. “By having contracts that clearly specify
childcare benefits, paid sick leave, and guaranteed tuition remission, unions
at public universities opened up the academy beyond the elite, to women, people
of color, and other groups that had previously been excluded by the
paternalistic authority of university administrators,” Noss explained.
But private universities have
actively campaigned to maintain their power to dictate working conditions
unilaterally.
After President Obama took
office in 2009, graduate organizers at NYU decided to re-petition the NLRB, asking
it to reverse what they saw as a politically motivated decision.
Though the regional board
quickly issued a decision favorable to GSOC-UAW, it required approval from the
NLRB. Graduate employees waited in limbo for more than three years for a decision.
With political problems
plaguing the Board, graduate students pondered alternatives.
“The health care cuts were a
wake-up call,” said Darach Miller, a PhD student in Biology. “We couldn’t keep
waiting for a national decision when NYU could cut something else without
warning… A lot of us realized that NYU can’t be trusted.”
Over the course of the last
academic year, GSOC-UAW gathered 1,000 signatures on an open letter to the
university and a petition to lower health care costs, as well as 250 signatures
from city and state elected representatives.
Meanwhile, faculty members
were putting increasing pressure on President John Sexton over his expansion
plans, both in New York City and at campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. Faculty
from several schools within NYU voted to affirm no confidence in his leadership.
Deal Includes Most
As graduate employees
ratcheted up the pressure, NYU approached GSOC-UAW in February with an offer:
the university would recognize collective bargaining rights for a subset of
teaching assistants at its flagship Washington Square campus—but only if the
union would exclude all research assistants (RAs) and all grad employees at the
recently acquired NYU-Poly campus in Brooklyn, as well as agree to refrain from
organizing RAs for at least 10 years.
Grad employees rejected the
deal.
In November, NYU tried again
with a better offer. Through a series of conversations, the union and the
university reached an agreement.
NYU would respect the right
of all graduate employees at both Washington Square and NYU-Poly—except RAs in
the hard sciences—to vote for a union. The bargaining unit specified in the
agreement covers more than were covered under the first contract with NYU.
Significantly, the
administration and faculty would remain neutral on the issue during the
election. And if employees voted for representation, the university would
immediately recognize the union and start bargaining.
The question of research
assistants remains a point of contention. Academic research in the hard
sciences is tightly linked to industry—particularly because of the 1980s
Bayh-Dole legislation that allows private patents to be claimed from
publicly-awarded research funds. Private universities seem intent on making
sure unionization does not extend to researchers in the hard sciences.
As part of the agreement, the
union would withdraw its petitions from the NLRB.
After consulting with
graduate employees in every major department, organizers ultimately made the
decision that waiting on the political waffling of the NLRB had not proven to
be a successful strategy. It was neither clear how the Board would rule on the
composition of the bargaining unit, nor guaranteed that the Board would rule at
all.
Foregoing the possibility of
setting a legal precedent, organizers instead sought to demonstrate the power
of building from the bottom up.
“Withdrawing the petition
from the NLRB was a tough decision,” Noss said. “But we ultimately made the
calculus that we didn’t need to wait to for permission from the NLRB.”
What’s Next
“While we would still like to
see the Brown University decision overturned,” said Julie Kushner, director of
UAW Region 9A, “we would also hope that university administrators would see
this agreement as a way to develop productive relations with graduate employees
seeking union representation and follow NYU’s lead on neutrality.
“We know from the excitement
among the workers at NYU that this agreement will be looked to as a model by
graduate employees at other universities.”
Meanwhile, graduate employees
at other private universities are re-evaluating their tactics for organizing.
Molly Cunningham, a graduate employee and an organizer with Graduate Students
United at the University of Chicago, said the victory at NYU has energized
graduate workers there.
“GSOC's victory has
reinvigorated our commitment to keep up the work of building our union, with or
without an NLRB ruling,” Cunningham said.
After a long semester,
organizers at NYU are looking towards bargaining.
And for research assistants
in the hard sciences and engineering, the fight is far from over. “Those left
out are going to have to keep pushing forward on the RA issue,” said Miller,
who is part of the group that was excluded.
Source: Labor
Notes
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