[An article in two parts]
“This is about the N.Y.U. administration’s union busting,” John J Sweeney, president, AFL-CIO
On Aug. 31, just before this school year began, a major demonstration took place on New York University’s campus in Greenwich Village. Cheered on by a crowd of more than five-hundred, seventy-six people were arrested for blocking the entrance to NYU’s Bobst Library in civil disobedience.
Among those arrested were John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, local politicians, as well as scores of union-members from other universities such as Yale and the University of Massachusetts (1).
The action took place at Bobst because the library’s upper floors house the offices of NYU’s executive administrators; it happened on Aug. 31 to mark the day that UAW Local 2110’s contract with the university expired — one which the administration refused to re-negotiate. Over the past seven years the NYU administration — currently headed by President John Sexton and Vice President Jack Lew — has gone to great lengths in trying to de-legitimatize and ultimately destroy the fledgling Local 2110 branch.
These vicious, relentless efforts can be understood as yet another instance of administration-lead union-busting activity in the Academy.
In a way, however, the struggle at NYU introduces a unique twist into the history of labor-employer relations. At NYU, Local 2110 is known as GSOC, the Graduate Student Organizing Committee. GSOC represents more than 1000 teaching assistants (TAs) that constitute a major section of NYU’s undergraduate teaching apparatus; it is also the first graduate student union to receive a contract from a private university.
That was in 2002; in 2004, a newly-composed National Labor Relations Board (Bush appointed) ruled that private universities were under no obligation to recognize student unions. The decision explains — but does not necessitate — NYU’s refusal to bargain; as a result, since Aug. 31 and up until three weeks ago, GSOC TAs have worked contract-less. On Nov. 9, TAs began a strike which will last until they force NYU to negotiate, they say (2).
I believe that the NYU dispute is a highly relevant topic of discussion on this campus, for a number of reasons. First, though, I will briefly give it some background and context.
Grad Students, United.
Graduate student unionization campaigns on U.S. college campuses have reached a level of salience sufficient to be considered collectively as a social movement. Currently, the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) lists 25 recognized and 10 unrecognized graduate student unions on campuses which span the country, from Rhode Island to Washington State (3). Nowadays, graduate students are more likely to be unionized than the average American worker.
The first student union to win collective bargaining power was the University of Wisconsin’s (MidWes!) Teaching Assistants’ Association in 1969, but the recent wave of efforts to win representation — notably in private, elite universities — can be traced back to the inception of Yale’s Graduate Employee-Student Union (GESO-UNITE-HERE Locals 34/35) in the early 1990s. For more than a decade, GESO has won substantive victories for TAs and other workers at Yale, all the while battling an obstinate and arrogant administration which has never officially recognized it. The ruthless (and illegal) tactics used by Yale administrators—centered upon intimidation—to crush the TA grade strike of 1995 sent shockwaves through academia and galvanized unionization campaigns at other Ivy schools (4).
GSOC’s campaign began in 1998, pitting organizers against an administration just as hostile as the Yale Corporation (The Yale Corporation is the actual name they use). The NYU administration employed familiar anti-union tactics, using email to disseminate paternalistic and classist misrepresentations about the union to faculty and students, skirting the law in advising professors to inform students that there “might” (vs. “will”) be academic/professional consequences for their (unrelated) union activity, and hiring Proskauer-Rose, a law firm (also used by Yale) specializing in “union-resistance” to delay and challenge GSOC’s case (5). NYU also broke the law, by firing Joel Westheimer, the only non-tenured faculty member to testify in support of GSOC. Mr. Westheimer, whose scholarship and teaching had been praised consistently until the time of his testimony, was fired in retaliation; his legal victory against the university confirms this claim (6). In the end, GSOC prevailed, winning students dignity, better (-than-poverty) wages, and health care (7).
(1) Arenson, “76 Arrested Protesting N.Y.U.’s Cutoff of Student Union,” NYT 9/1/2005
(2) Undergraduate newspaper: www.nyunews.com
(3) www.cgeu.org
(4) http://www.yaleunions.org/geso; Social Text, Yale Strike Dossier (JSTOR)
(5) Jessup, in Johnson, Steal this University
(6) http://www.eisnerassociates.com/westheimer/05.06.press.htm
(7) http://www.2110uaw.org/gsoc/
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