On the picket line

NYU strikers ignore deadline

The Graduate Student Organizing Committee, UAW Local 2110, has kept its word. The GSOC strike, begun on Nov. 9, continues despite New York University President John Sexton’s ultimatum that all stipends and teaching assignments would be stopped for those who continued to strike after a Dec. 7 deadline.

Support for the GSOC continues to pour in. It held a rally, including representatives of national and local labor organizations, on the day of the deadline. A petition signed by more than 5,000 scholars around the world urges Sexton to recognize and negotiate with the union. (Read it at petition online.com.) On Dec. 3 the Collective Bargaining Congress of the American Association of University Professors, on behalf of the 28,000 unionized academic employees it represents, called on Sexton “to rescind immediately his threat to retaliate against workers exercising their democratic rights.”

A letter signed by about 90 international graduate students notes their special concerns: “We, as international students, feel especially vulnerable to your antagonizing, intimidating and outrageous threats. Many of us have had to deal with increasingly restrictive U.S. immigration policies, enhanced surveillance and record keeping and with hostility when being questioned by immigration officers. Some of us have suffered the threat of deportation. Thus, we are concerned with maintaining our legal status in this country.” Despite that, the letter affirms the students’ support for the right to unionize.

In the meantime there have been several new proposals to create various graduate-student bodies at NYU. GSOC spokes person Susan Valentine said of them: “All the proposals say the same thing—to get rid of our union. And nothing has shown us that we need a union more than the administration’s willingness to threaten and intimidate us as we try to bargain for better working conditions.”

Breakthrough for unionization in South

In what has been described as “the biggest unionization drive in the South in decades,” the Service Employees union has just won collective bargaining rights for thousands of janitors in Houston as part of its Justice for Janitors campaign.

The janitors, nearly all of them immigrants, earn just over $100 a week on average, usually working part time for $5.25 an hour. No wonder the union billed the union drive as an anti-poverty movement. Of course, the workers do not receive benefits.

Because the union movement is not strong in Texas, the union had to use creative ways to pressure the companies that employ the janitors. Calling a strike at one building in Houston helped, but sympathy strikes at 75 office buildings in four other states really stepped up pressure.

Office building janitors average $20 an hour in New York and $13.30 in Chicago and Philadelphia, where office rents are comparable with those in Houston. In New Jersey a recent union contract boosted wages for 4,500 janitors from $5.85 an hour three years ago to $11.90 an hour today. Many workers also achieved full-time status with health benefits.

NYC security guards unionize

As part of its program to organize 75,000 security guards nationwide, Service Employees Local 32BJ will now represent 1,000 security guards with Burns International Security Services in New York City. This is the union’s first victory to unionize 10,000 security guards there. Local 32BJ will soon negotiate better wages and benefits for guards at City Uni versity campuses, Yeshiva University, AT&T and Pfizer.