Graduate Students Sign Union Cards at Meeting Sunday

Over 50 graduate students signed official union cards and began collecting dues at the third general assembly meeting of the Cornell Graduate Students United Sunday.

The signing of officially recognized membership cards marks a “historic” point for the nascent Cornell Graduate Students United, which formed in early 2014 to pursue better work and labor conditions for graduate students, according to Andrew Crook grad, the Cornell Graduate Students United Communications and Outreach committee chair, in a press release.

By signing cards, the members of the Cornell Graduate Students United are taking the first step toward organizing union representation for graduate students.

The signing of the cards “and the collection of dues builds a formal architecture in which CGSU members can address their common interests as graduate workers and build a voice in the academic workplace,” Crook said.

Cornell Graduate Students United’s card signing follows recent successful organizing efforts at other private universities. Graduate students at New York University won voluntary support from the administration for their graduate student union in 2013, according to The New Yorker.

In early December, graduate students at Columbia University gathered enough signatures to request the administration and petition the National Labor Relations board for official recognition. Students at the New School have since joined with those at Columbia in their petition, The New Yorker reported.

Interest among graduate students at Cornell in organizing grew in March of last year, in particular over issues regarding workers’ compensation, according to the press release. The issue of workers’ compensation led to the creation of a task force that, according to vice provost and dean of the Graduate School Barbara Knuth, resulted in the “documentation of Cornell’s procedures for graduate student injuries.”

“The ‘new’ part of these procedures was [to codify] them all in one document for clarity, and [to add] an explicit category to Cornell’s online injury reporting system to more explicitly be able to identify when graduate students are reporting injuries so that these procedures can more readily be invoked as soon as such an injury is known,” Knuth said.

Knuth declined to comment on Sunday evening on the Cornell Graduate Students United meeting, citing a lack of “direct knowledge” of the discussions.

Graduate students at Cornell previously attempted to form a union in 2002 and held an election to decide on unionization, but graduate students voted against unionization by a margin of 1,351 to 580, The Sun previously reported

Source: The Cornell Daily Sun