Category Archives: Strikes

Yale Daily News: GESO embroiled in NYU labor dispute

Students and faculty fight on opposite sides of the picket line in labor union protest
BY EASHA ANAND
Staff Reporter

Of the dozen staffers in the New York University graduate student labor movement’s office last night, fully half were Yale students. They were members of the Graduate Employee and Student Organization, a conglomerate of Yale graduate students fighting for the right to unionize in New Haven. They are scheduling classes in meeting spaces across the city for faculty members who do not want to cross the picket line to teach, sweet-talking members of the NYU trustee board and even doing jail time for their peers, NYU’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee.

“No union has done more than GESO to help our cause,” GSOC organizer Michael Palm said.

And before the picket lines, before the mass arrests and ultimatums, it was Yale President Richard Levin who first brought Yale clout to the NYU fray, Palm said. At a town hall meeting last February, barraged by questions about his refusal to negotiate with the unions, NYU president John Sexton admitted he was under pressure from other private universities, including Yale.

Neither NYU’s nor Yale’s administration acknowledged the comment — as John Beckman, spokesman for President Sexton, put it, “one has to pose the common sense question to oneself, what pressure could another university bring to NYU?” But the quote has been shopped around by The Nation, among other national publications. Several GSOC members swear by it, citing it as evidence of a larger corporatisation conspiracy to permanently dismantle the sacred learning space they refer to as “the academy.”
Whatever the outcome of NYU’s winter of discontent, Yale will be watching closely. For GESO, NYU’s graduate students winning a second contract might be the best thing that has happened to academic organizing in half a decade; for Yale’s administration, NYU’s GSOC regaining its status as the only organized graduate labor movement at a private university would be among the worst.

In an era of unprecedented labor-management peace, Yale’s role in the NYU strike is one of several changes playing out beneath the picket-sensitive radar of most students that promise to reshape Yale’s labor unions — and its management — for years to come.

Talking about the GESO-GSOC labor union movement, of course, requires defining labor and defining union, historically points of contention in universities. Though graduate students at public universities are governed by state legislation — Connecticut’s legislature neither explicitly allows not explicitly bans organized labor among graduate students — private universities are governed by the National Labor Relations Board. In 2000, the NLRB voted to acknowledge GSOC as a bona fide union; in 2004, flush, as graduate student unionizers argue, with ideologically motivated Bush appointees, the NLRB reversed its decision, now leaving it to each university’s discretion whether or not to bargain with its graduate students. When GSOC’s contract expired in 2005 and Sexton did not offer a satisfactory replacement that included recognition for GSOC as a union, GSOC lost its union status alongside the legal omerta that guaranteed it.

So the GSOC movement, with help from GESO, turned out in full force. Picket lines were set up, classes taught by sympathetic faculty members moved off campus, and drums and chants became the background noise of the university. Galvanized by faculty support and a national outpouring of sympathy — the American Association of University Professors even signed a letter asking Sexton to listen to his students — GSOC kept the pressure up through November.

But right after Thanksgiving, President Sexton issued an ultimatum: Stop this nonsense and get back to work, or lose both your eligibility to teach and your stipend — the only way to cover living expenses in expensive New York City.

GSOC members say it’s not as bad as all that. As one op-ed in Washington Square News, the NYU student newspaper, pointed out, withholding pay from graduate students who refuse to teach means acknowledging that they are getting paid to teach, not study, contradicting the primary argument the university administrations have used against graduate students’ right to organize as employees.

GSOC spokesperson Susan Valentine is a medieval history TA who went from forgetting that she had signed her union membership card to spending so much time on the picket line that it reunited her with a high school acquaintance — from Yale, no less. She says that it’s impossible to know who’s on strike and who’s not with any level of certainty, so the question of moving from threat to reality remains open.

“I’m very visibly on strike, and I’m still getting paid,” Valentine said. “How could they drop the hammer in such a way that they would know it was hitting the right people?”

But the ultimatum was still harsh, and the future still uncertain. With undergraduates getting tuition refunds and final grades still not posted for some classes, NYU needs to find a way to end the conflict, and GESO members are trying to tip the scales in favor of the graduate students.

There are vital differences between the two movements. Most importantly, NYU students are striking to preserve the status quo. Half of NYU’s graduate students joined the University when GSOC’s contract, which included a provision recognizing them as a union, was in place, while Elis are fighting for recognition they have never had. NYU’s other unions have a “no-sympathy strike” clause in their contract, while Yale’s Locals 34 and 35 have been on the picket lines with GESO. According to Evan Cobb GRD ’07, a GESO spokesman, NYU’s faculty has been much more vocal in exerting control over what goes on in their university than Yale’s faculty members have ever been.

But most of the central debates over GESO have already been played out at NYU.

GSOC was recognized by the university after an NLRB-certified election established that a majority of graduate students wanted union status. GESO has never had an NLRB election — Levin once publicly declared he would “fight it all the way to the Supreme Court” if they did — but Connecticut’s secretary of state confirmed that they represented a majority of graduate students, former GESO chair Mary Reynolds ’07 said.

But Gagan Sood GRD ’06, a graduate student who is not a member of GESO, said the confirmation is in name only, and does not reflect the number of graduate students arm-twisted and guilt-tripped into paying their union dues. He said he has friends who would screen their calls and leave the campus on weekends to avoid GESO’s recruiting efforts, which included forcing them to meet with acquaintances in GESO for coffees and teas.

“There’s a passive majority who really couldn’t care less about what GESO does, but using friendships to peddle its views oversteps the bounds of decency and common courtesy,” Sood said. “If you’re not aggressive by temperament, running away is an easy option.”

Then there’s the issue of whether or not unions at private universities are even necessary. Yale officials have said the salary and benefits package at the University is, and will remain for the foreseeable future, significantly better than the ones at any public university, including those that are unionized. Public institutions are also subject to the whims of tight-fisted state legislatures, which can rescind such basic graduate student staples as tuition waivers whenever budgetary constraints dictate.

But Robert Vodicka, a member of the University of Kansas’ recognized union, said what matters are not the specific terms of unions’ contracts, but the principle of the thing.

“The point is that universities across the board have tried to claim that we are not employees,” Vodicka said. “And it is important to refute that claim, because it is false.”

Whatever happens in New York, New Haven will not be out of the limelight for long, Reynolds said.

“For cross-class, cross-race, cross-occupation organizing, New Haven is not just a model,” she said. “It is the model.”

Copyright © 1995-2005 Yale Daily News Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Inside Higher Ed: With New York University’s campus closed as of Wednesday, striking NYU graduate students will leave the picket line until January 9. Striking students — who are demanding that the university negotiate a contract with their union — have assured the administration that they will return to the picket line when classes resume.

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BBC: Bulgarian teachers on strike

The National Teachers’ Union said there were no classes on Monday in more than 2,000 schools and kindergarten

BNN: Nearly 2, 000 schools and more than 500 kindergartens are expected to join the national teachers’ effective strike, which begins Monday, the private bTV channel announced.

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Inside Higher Ed: Conflicting claims on NYU strike

New York University told striking graduate assistants that they would lose their stipends for the spring if they did not return to class last Wednesday. With the day of reckoning having passed, some graduate assistants have ended their strike, while others maintain that they will stop at nothing short of union recognition.

NYU officials say that 75 percent of graduate assistants have returned to the classroom. Administrators surveyed classrooms on Wednesday to come up with that figure. That number represents an analysis of Wednesday courses in which graduate assistants are primary instructors — 165 of NYU’s 2,700 classes.

But members of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, the local affiliate of the United Auto Workers that had represented about 1,000 NYU graduate assistants, pointed out that the number is not representative of the impact of the remaining picketers.

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NYC Indy Media: A lesson in class

The lines are becoming clear in a battle that many see as critical to organized labor’s future on college campuses. On the one side is a powerful university with a billion-dollar endowment, backed by anti-union faculty and reportedly aided by high priced union-busting lawyers. On the other side are more than a thousand members of GSOC, part of United Auto Workers Local 2110, supported by undergraduate and faculty committees, local politicians, the labor movement, prominent academics, religious leaders and thousands of other community members.

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Bulgarian teacher go on strike

Bulgarian teachers from across the country will head for the picket lines on Monday after talks for a 15% pay rise failed.

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Socialist Worker Online: NYU plays hardball

ew York University (NYU) President John Sexton greeted the fourth week of a strike by teaching assistants demanding union recognition by threatening that we will lose our entire spring stipends and our eligibility to teach.

Even TAs who return to work would be bound to report all absences to the dean, or risk losing stipends and appointments for two consecutive semesters. These conditions are particularly threatening to international students, who can’t legally work outside the university.

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Inside Higher Ed reports:

At the request of the chair of the Graduate Affairs Committee of New York University’s student government, NYU has agreed to give striking graduate assistants two more days — until Wednesday — to return to work before losing their stipends for the spring. Over the next two weeks, the committee will form a university-wide group of elected graduate assistants that, according to a letter from President John Sexton, the university has agreed to speak with about graduate student issues.

New York Post reports:

December 6, 2005 — New York University, which warned striking graduate assistants last week to return to work by yesterday or risk losing their stipends, has agreed to delay taking action until tomorrow.

A student government group had asked NYU to postpone cutting off the stipends and called on the Graduate Student Organizing Committee to suspend the strike by 5 p.m. today.

But a GSOC member said there were no plans to end the strike, which began Nov. 9. The students had been represented by Local 2110 of the United Automobile Workers until last summer, when NYU said it would no longer recognize a grad-student union.

AP

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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.

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Dear President Sexton: About the Strike

By Jesse Lemisch

Mr. Lemisch is Professor of History Emeritus, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

“NEW YORK UNIVERSITY’S PRESIDENT warned striking teaching assistants on Monday that those who fail to return to the classroom by December 5 will lose their teaching assignments — and stipends — for the spring semester.”–Chronicle of Higher Education 11-29-95

To: John Sexton, President, New York University [mailto:john.sexton@nyu.edu]
From: Jesse Lemisch, Professor Emeritus of History, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY [utopia1@attglobal.net]

A word about the GSOC [Graduate Student Organizing Committee] strike, historians, and how NYU looks to the larger world:

It’s simply grotesque that a university that seeks to show an advanced and somewhat liberal face to the world should use the retrograde action of Bush’s NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] as a basis for an attack on the existence of GSOC. I said to one member of your faculty that your recent email to striking graduate student employees (below) suggested to me that NYU was following a repressive strategy earlier developed by Columbia and its provost, Alan Brinkley (see my History News Network article, “Alan Brinkley: Liberalism in Collapse?”). Your colleague responded that NYU has less in common with the Ivy League than with Wal-Mart. The spreading perception of this shameful behavior is bound to have implications for NYU’s faculty and graduate student recruitment and for its general standing in and beyond academe.

I have enjoyed immensely my contacts with GESO at Yale, GSEU at Columbia, and GSOC. I don’t have the figures at hand, but it’s certainly my impression that history graduate students play a disproportionate role in these unions. I know these people and their work. Let me tell you, President Sexton, these are our very best young people. They are among the most serious and dedicated scholars and teachers I have known in a career that has included Yale, the University of Chicago, Northwestern, SUNY/Buffalo, and CUNY. They have seamlessly welded together a moving and admirable quest for social justice with deep, serious and original scholarship.

It’s also germane to mention that the University of Chicago Alumni Association has, in frustration and regret, labeled the classes of 1964-74 the “Lost Classes.” These alums are embittered and alienated from their alma mater now — thirty to forty years later — because of unprincipled repressive acts committed by the U of C in those days, including political firings and mass expulsions, closely related to what you are now threatening.

Together with others, I will do everything I can within and beyond my discipline to bring attention to your unacceptable behavior — in the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the CUNY faculty, and every outlet for publication that I have. A large audience will be watching you closely.

Jesse Lemisch

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Dear colleague,

PLEASE HELP US HEAD OFF DISASTER AT NYU!

In 1999-2000 teaching assistants at NYU conducted a union drive, won an election, and affiliated with the United Auto Workers, in a local that also includes other educational professionals in New York City, including employees at the Museum of Modern Art and the New-York Historical Society. The NYU administration fought hard against the union but was ultimately forced to recognize and negotiate with it by the National Labor Relations Board, which ruled that teaching assistants at private universities were (like those at public universities, who are covered by state rather than federal labor law) workers and therefore had the right to unionize. There followed a three-year contract that brought the teaching assistants a voice in their working lives, health benefits and a stipend increase. During this time the university ran quite smoothly.

In the summer of 2005, after new Bush appointees to the NLRB produced a majority which reversed the board’s previous ruling, the NYU administration decided not to recognize the union or negotiate a new contract with it. Under the circumstances, the union (known as the Graduate Students Organizing Committee, GSOC) had little alternative but to strike.

The strike began on November 9, and several hundred professors have been teaching off-campus so as not to cross a picket line. NYU President John Sexton has adamantly refused to deal with the union and has ignored even a compromise proposal by a former dean; he seems to be willing to go to any length to break the strike. At one point, for example, several administrators secretly added their names to course email lists in order to be able to determine which faculty and teaching assistants were supporting the strike; this resulted in widespread faculty outrage about the violation of the right to privacy and the faculty-student relationship, forcing the deans to back down and apologize.

But now President Sexton has taken an even more draconian step: he has threatened that any TAs who do not return to work by December 5th will be deprived of their stipend for the spring semester and barred from teaching; and those who strike in the spring semester will lose two semesters of funding.

Such an action would be unprecedented. Graduate student employees have struck at many other universities, but nowhere have such draconian reprisals been threatened. Nor could such action be taken against workers protected by federal or state labor law: while employers may withhold wages during a strike, it is illegal to penalize workers in the way that NYU now threatens to do. If NYU is allowed to get away with this it will cause grave damage to the hard-won standing and reputation of this one university, but it will also set a very dangerous precedent for colleges and universities across the country.

Hundreds of NYU faculty have formed a group, Faculty Democracy, to protest President Sexton’s policies and to fight for a larger and more effective faculty role in university governance. Had there been anything like serious consultation with faculty at NYU, it is hard to imagine that the administration would have made the disastrous decisions it has made, decisions that may lead to the effective expulsion of some of our best graduate students and that put NYU’s future at grave risk.

We ask faculty, scholars and intellectuals throughout the country to urge President Sexton to rescind his threats and agree to negotiate with the union. Please email him immediately at john.sexton@nyu.edu

And please send a copy of your message to the original sender of this letter.

Thank you,

Linda Gordon, History
Andrew Ross, American Studies
Alan Sokal, Physics
Mary-Louise Pratt, Spanish
(writing for Faculty Democracy, numbering approximately 250 NYU faculty)

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Inside Higher Ed: NYU undergrads join strike—For a day

Some New York University undergraduates played hooky Wednesday to show support for striking graduate students.

Hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students and faculty members — estimates ranged from 250, by NYU, to 450-800, by protesters — forsook the classroom for a rally, organized by the undergraduate-run Graduate/Undergraduate Solidarity Committee, in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. It was unclear how many of those in attendance were undergraduates boycotting class for the day, but several people made rough guesses that there were around 100 undergraduates at the rally.

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New York Times: N.Y.U. Sets Deadline for Return of Strikers

New York University issued an ultimatum yesterday to its striking graduate student teaching and research assistants: They must return to classes and other assignments next week or lose their financial stipends and their eligibility to teach next semester. Those who return next week will not be penalized.

Inside Higher Ed: Hitting them in the pocket

Since November 9, striking New York University graduate assistants have still been getting paychecks. But Monday, NYU let the picketers know the cash flow will soon be squeezed off.

“Graduate assistants who do not resume their duties by December 5 or the first scheduled teaching assignment thereafter … will for the spring semester lose their stipend and their eligibility to teach,” reads the e-mail from President John Sexton to all graduate assistants. Later in the letter, Sexton says that students who do not report for duty will actually lose their stipend and assignments for the next two semesters, not just the spring.

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The NYU GSOC is asking all graduate and undergraduate students to boycott classes for the day and join in protesting NYU administration’s refusal to bargain. Details can be found here.

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Hunger Strikers Keep Pressure on Bulgaria’s Govt

The major protest of Bulgarian schoolteachers against low wages entered its eighth day on Monday, with continuing concerns about the health of hunger strikers.

Pravda: Bulgarian teachers demand better wages

About 2,000 teachers across Bulgaria began a symbolic “hunger” strike Friday demanding higher wages and increased government spending on education. The teachers will not eat food, but will continue to nourish themselves with liquids such as tea, juice, and coffee, said Veneta Milanova, a teachers’ union coordinator in the city of Pernik, about 32 kilometers (20 miles) west of Sofia.

Bulgarian teachers’ strike, a lesson in civic education

2000 teachers from all over the country went on a termless hunger strike and declared their protest against the government’s policy in the field of education.

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Pennsbury teachers return to the classroom without a contract; negotiations move into non-binding arbitration

Pennsbury students and teachers were expected back in the school district’s classrooms Tuesday following a 21-day strike by the teachers that failed to immediately produce a new contract with the school board.

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Inside Higher Ed: Day 10 on the Picket Line

Striking New York University graduate students trickled toward the picket line at 8 a.m. Monday, continuing the strike prompted by the university’s decision to end recognition of the graduate student union this summer. There has been no official contact between university and union officials, but strike supporters say their resolve is as strong as ever. Today will be their 10th day on strike.

GSOC Strike Center

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