NY Daily News: Grad teacher makes the case for a contract
By: Maggie Clinton
I am one of hundreds of graduate employees at New York University who have been on strike since Nov. 9. We work as teaching and research assistants – teaching classes, directing labs and performing research and administrative duties. We are on strike to bring the NYU administration to the table to negotiate a second contract.We negotiated our first contract with the university in 2001, improving our working conditions dramatically. Before we won a contract, our salaries rarely rose above $10,000 a year. We struggled to make ends meet while NYU’s endowment grew past $1 billion and its president’s annual salary passed $500,000. We had no process for resolving unfair treatment or oversights by the university.
With our contract, however, our salaries increased 40% on average, and we won employer-paid health care, workload limits and a grievance procedure to resolve problems on the job.
Since our contract expired in August, NYU has already cut our health benefits, and we are left wondering what other cuts might lie ahead.
Our contract made it possible for us to do better work, freed of the uncertainties and vulnerabilities we faced without a union. It also made the university work better. Hundreds of faculty members have attested to the positive impact of a clear, enforceable contract between graduate employees and the university, and have publicly called on NYU President John Sexton to negotiate a second contract.
Our struggle is very basic. Like many workers in America today, we work for relatively low pay for a large, wealthy employer. And like many workers, we have sought to improve our working conditions through a union, to find that our employer will go to great lengths to deny its workers a real voice on the job.
NYU’s motto is perstare et praestare, “to persevere and to excel.” NYU cannot excel without our work: Exams and papers are ungraded, classes canceled, manuscripts unedited, computer programs unwritten. Nor can NYU excel with the embarrassing reputation as a university that tried to break the union of its own teachers and researchers. That is why we will persevere in our strike, and why the NYU administration will be forced to sit down with us at the bargaining table.
Clinton is a graduate teacher in the history department of New York University.
Follow
