Yale Yesterday, Columbia Today, NYU Tomorrow
April 20 – The application list of an aspiring college freshman, you think? No.
Rather this is a progression of student-labor actions for union recognition of graduate teaching assistants (TAs) and research assistants (RAs), whose private university employers refusing to negotiate with them as an organized workforce. The rallies and marches are the apex of a weeklong coordinated strike running from April 18 – 22, the final week of classes at Yale.
Striking the final week of the spring semester has Yale’s campus in a tizzy, where one-third of the all office hours spent withundergraduate students. Yet, it may be the coordination between the Yale and Columbia campuses that most frightens the university administrators.
With related worker struggles at the New School, Brown and NYU, it is the strengthening bonds of graduate TAs between campuses increasing the prospects of far-reaching policy changes. Other contested issues include the workplace rights of janitors and clerical workers; the disproportionate rates of tenure for white males vis a vis faculty of color and female faculty; and, just and fair procurement activities ranging from the victorious campaign against Taco Bell to breaking exclusive contracts with Coca-Cola due to human rights violations in Colombia.
Tomorrow’s rally at NYU – the only private university in the country recognizing their union – and the worker-students there can only be emboldened by the weeklong strikes for raising the stakes in advance of their contract’s expiration in 2006.
This week’s strikes stem from a July 2004 National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision, which withdrew the graduate students’ collective bargaining rights by stating that they were only students, and do not classify as workers. The NLRB had always been the undesirable last resort for workers; and in this case, the Board voted 3-2, along partisan lines.
Meanwhile, undergraduate students are not far behind. This spring students assisted with living wage campaigns at Vanderbilt and Georgetown. Students at G’town lost a total of
270-290 pounds in a hunger strike forcing the Jesuit university’s economic policies to better reflect their preachings.
But, instead of deterring the worker/students from the struggle, it has only reinvigorated them and placed them within the ranks of workers struggling for fair wages, benefits and respect on the job. And the institutions, like typical greedy employers, hope to undermine their workers’ unionization at any cost.
As one speaker in the rally at stated, “Columbia is trying to become the Wal-Mart of universities! And we’re not gonna let that happen!”
- Chad, Politics Co-Editor
(photo by Evan Matthew Cobb)