On Campus
The GSOC Strike
The NYU Decision and the First Contract
On October 31, 2000, in a unanimous,
bipartisan decision involving NYU graduate teachers, the National
Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate teaching assistants are
employees. The Board rejected the claim that the graduate
teachers, who tutor, teach recitation sections, teach language courses
and grade exams and papers, were akin to disabled clients in a rehabilitation
program.
In March 2001, NYU became the first private university in the United
States to recognize a union of their graduate teachers. But
it wasn't until January 2002, that NYU settled a contract with the
graduate teachers union, dubbed GSOC
(Graduate Student Organizing Committee). The contract provided
for a minimum salary of $15,000 and health coverage and expired
August 31, 2005.
In the wake of the contract, two things happened.
First, in May 2002, NYU settled a claim brought against the university
for illegally retaliating against a former professor, Joel Westheimer,
for supporting GSOC. Westheimer claimed NYU denied him tenure
because he testified on GSOC's behalf at an NLRB hearing.
While NYU denied any wrongdoing, the university did agree to delete
all official records of the tenure denial and pay Westheimer $15,000.
The second important event was the organizing
of an adjunct union at NYU. In July 2002, more than 4,000
adjuncts became part of one of the largest adjunct unions in the
country. After 18 months of negotiations, and again on the
brink of a strike, NYU settled an 11th hour contract that provided
for increases in pay and health benefits.
The Brown Decision and NYU's Decision to not Negotiate
In July 2004, the Bush-appointed National
Labor Relations Board issued a 3-2 decision stripping graduate teachers
of the protections of federal labor law. In their dissent,
the two democrats on the Board wrote, "Today's decision is
woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality."
The decision means that graduate assistants that
want to form a union have to do so without the protections of the
law. In a chilling foreshadowing of things to come, the dissenters
wrote:
The result of the Board's ruling is harsh. Not only can universities
avoid dealing with graduate student unions, they are also free
to retaliate against graduate students who act together to address
their working conditions.
In June 2005, as the deadline for the NYU graduate assistants'
contract approached, NYU announced that it would not bargain a second
contract.
On the day the contract expired, GSOC members
joined with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, UAW Secretary-Treasurer
Elizabeth Bunn, UNITE HERE President Bruce Raynor and dozens of
graduate teachers from Columbia, Yale, Rutgers, University of Massachusetts
and University of Pennsylvania in committing an act of civil disobedience
to protest NYU's refusal to bargain with GSOC.
Graduate Teachers Strike
As the fall semester of 2005 progressed
NYU continued to refuse to negotiate despite pleas from faculty
and students. GSOC held a strike authorization vote at the
end of October, and when the ballots were all counted, 85% had voted
to go on strike. On November 9, 2005, GSOC members went on
strike. According to the Washington Square News, "More
than 600 supporters of the graduate students' union, including several
hundred graduate students, noisily started off an all-university
strike in front of Bobst Library."
The first week of the strike brought with it
allegations from the faculty that the administration had "surreptitiously
list[ed] deans and directors of undergraduate studies as instructors
on course-management sites, allowing those administrators to monitor
course discussions and other activity."
In the wake of this revelation, a group of 200
NYU faculty members sent NYU President John Sexton a letter in which
they wrote, "We consider this seizing of access to the communication
between professors and their registered students to be an intensely
unethical act, one that is in the deepest violation of academic
freedom."
NYU Strikes Back
On November 28, 2005, John Sexton sent an e-mail
letter to all graduate assistants, in which he wrote:
[G]raduate assistants who do not resume their duties by December
5 or the first scheduled teaching assignment thereafter - while
experiencing no consequences for this semester - will for the
spring semester lose their stipend and their eligibility to teach.
For those graduate assistants who return by
December 5th and accept a teaching assignment for the spring,
this acceptance comes with the commitment to meet their responsibilities
without interruption throughout the spring semester. Absences
not approved by the dean will result in suspension from assistantship
assignments and loss of stipend for the following two consecutive
semesters.
The Washington Square News editorial staff termed this a "frighteningly
blunt ultimatum," and wrote:
The strike is ultimately not about stipends and benefit packages,
but about recognition. That's it. What Sexton's offer (demand,
really) amounts to is a patronizing assurance that the graduate
students can trust in an administration that is always acting
in their best interests, even when punishing the recalcitrant
strikers who don't know what's good for them. It's simply insulting.
In the Spring Semester, NYU cut the pay of 23
strikers —fewer than the number on strike, because many of
the strikers' names were not been reported to the central administration.
There has been strong support for GSOC from several
areas. So far, almost
7,000 academics have signed an open letter to President Sexton
expressing their "objections to the New York University administration's
efforts to defeat the graduate student union and retaliate against
those who have initiated and sustained the current strike."
Politicians have pledged their support, organized labor has joined
GSOC at every rally, and over 100 religious leaders sent President
Sexton a letter urging him to negotiate with the union.
On April 27, 2006, after having been on strike
for close to six months, GSOC released a petition signed by a majority
of graduate teachers calling on NYU to negotiate with the union.
On the same day during a rally, in an act of civil disobedience,
57 people were arrested.
At the end of spring semester claess with the summer break ahead,
GSOC moved to recess the strike.
NYU's Image
In a recent article in the New York Press, NYU
President John Sexton was ranked as the 7th most loathsome New Yorker,
calling him "the Andrew Carnegie of Academia." The
Press wrote:
John Sexton helms NYU, that beacon of Downtown real estate and
strike-busting. Sexton gave the rising princes of capitalism at
the Stern School of Business a lesson in how to break the back
of underpaid workers when he refused to negotiate with the Graduate
Student Organizing Committee. The private university grad student
union's contract had expired, and Sexton's stonewalling led to
a November strike.
For a version of this article with notes, see the PDF.
To see a video about the strike, click
here. |
