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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the April 20, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------HUGGING, CLAPPING, DANCING
NYU graduate employees win right to union
By Shelley Ettinger
New York
Champagne corks popped. Whoops of joy resounded. People hugged and clapped and danced.
Not the sort of behavior commonly associated with ivory-tower academics.
That's because those celebrating April 4 in the Wagner Labor Archives of New York University's Bobst Library live in the real world of toil and struggle. They are workers. And they had finally won legal recognition as such.
On April 3, National Labor Relations Board Region 2 Director Daniel Silverman ruled in favor of NYU graduate employees' right to union representation and collective bargaining. He said the union--United Auto Workers/Graduate Students Organizing Committee--was free to file for a representation election at any time.
That filing came days later. The vote will take place April 25-27.
And the union expects to win, despite the "anti-union PR campaign" UAW organizer Lisa Jessup accused NYU administrators of waging.
Stop campus union busting
Silverman's decision was historic. It will have far-reaching national ramifications. For the first time, the board found that federal labor law covers teaching assistants and graduate assistants--graduate students who work for wages.
While unions have made great strides organizing graduate workers at public universities around the country, the effort has been tougher at private schools. Dipping into million- or even billion-dollar endowments, administrators have hired top-gun anti-labor law firms to fight long legal battles to keep the unions out. At Yale University, for example, the graduate workers' struggle to win union rights has gone on for over a decade.
Yale and other universities have been watching the NYU struggle closely. Not just watching, either. It's clear that Yale and NYU are in close touch, strategizing jointly about how to crush the graduate workers' aspirations.
In fact, the bosses' interests extend beyond university campuses. This ruling class as a whole has a lot at stake.
NYU is the biggest private university in the country. Although nominally non-profit, it is a big-money institution with billionaire bosses. Its board of directors is a Who's Who of New York's real-estate oligarchy. Not top ranked in academic prestige, NYU still manages to charge tuition that is among the country's highest.
Yet the people who actually perform the labor that is supposed to be the basic mission of a university--teaching undergraduate students--are treated shabbily.
In addition to pursuing graduate studies and writing a doctoral dissertation, a typical TA is expected to put in about 30 hours a week teaching, holding office hours, reading and responding to papers, conducting and grading exams, making copies, preparing lectures, and so on.
For this NYU pays about $10,000 a year before taxes. No medical insurance. No provision of affordable housing. No family benefits.
Even these sub-standard wages and conditions are apparently not available to people of color. The ranks of NYU's TAs and GAs are heavily white.
So it should not have come as a shock when these workers decided they need a union. Their demands are the same as those of low-wage workers in many other industries: decent wages, basic benefits, improved working conditions and an end to discrimination.
Kimberly Johnson, one of the organizing drive's leaders and a doctoral student in American Studies, said, "It is very clear to me that what we do here is work, and like any other workers we should be able to take an active role in setting our working conditions."
Almost a year ago the union submitted cards signed by a majority of the 1,700 teaching assistants and graduate assistants seeking representation. In response the NYU administration sought a labor board ruling that the TAs and GAs are not employees.
New York City Central Labor Council President Brian McLoughlin appealed to NYU President L. Jay Oliva to stop stone walling and allow the workers their right to representation. He was told that the university would fight all the way to the Supreme Court.
A long process of hearings, testimony and legal briefs ensued. NYU trotted out its academic deans--including some formerly known as progressive scholars--to make tortuous arguments that these workers don't work.
But the workers themselves testified movingly about their struggles to feed families on starvation wages. The union submitted factual documentation. And this stage of the struggle was won.
After Silverman issued his ruling, the NYU administration howled in outrage--issuing a barrage of press statements and interviews and beefing up efforts to enlist the faculty in its anti-union campaign. Yet the bosses had to change their arguments in light of the ruling.
In earlier letters issued to the "university community," Provost Harvey Steadman had cited 20-year-old rulings against graduate-employee unionizing. Now NYU is suddenly singing a different song, with Vice President Robert Berne complaining, "Silverman's decision gives little recognition to the realities of modern graduate education."
Those realities now include unions. Calling the administrators' union busting "a waste of money, time, and a denial of basic rights," UAW Assistant Regional Director Julie Kushner said this struggle will continue until a contract is signed. Leaders of Teachers Local 3882, the NYU clerical workers' union that has long experience confronting the administration's union busting, pledged support and solidarity.
The writer, an NYU secretary, is a member of Local 3882.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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