The Graduate Employee Strike At NYU



Since November, graduate student employees of NYU (TA's, GA's, RA's etc) have been on strike. NYU's GSOC was the first graduate student union to win recognition at a private univeristy. The Bush National Labor Relations Board, however, released NYU from its obligation to recognize the union. When their contract ended this year, NYU refused to recognize the union, and seeks to 'take care' of its graduate students on good faith. In the meantime, however, graduate students claim that since the end of the contract, they have seen their health care costs rise dramatically. When the strike commenced, NYU apparently engaged in ethically dubious activities to coerce graduate students back into work. It has been reported that the administration entered Blackboard course pages in an effort to discover if the GA/TA in question had suspended courses. This is an incomplete account of the events, more information can be found at the GSOC webpage here.

Recently, the president of the university issued a statement saying that graduate students who do not report back to work by December 5 will lose their stipends for the Spring semester, and further, that students who strike again will lose their assistantships. That statement is available here. These actions are being called the most draconian response to the graduate student labor movement. Judith Butler, Joan Scott, Frederic jameson, Slovoj Zizek and others have issued a statement in response and are calling for signatures on an online petition site. Their letter is also reproduced below.

To: President John Sexton, NYU
December 2, 2005
John Sexton
President, New York University

We, the undersigned faculty from several universities in the United States and abroad, write to express our 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. The union in question was clearly instated on the basis of a fair election which then obligated New York University to negotiate with the appointed representatives in a fair and open manner. Although the NLRB in 2005 released the university from its obligations to recognize the union, it did not authorize retaliatory action on the part of the university.The recent actions of your office, now widely publicized, defy all protocols of civility and fairness and herald a bellicose approach to the union and its demands for fair wages, decent health care, and provisional job security.

As we all know, there may be differences of opinion on how best to formulate policies that would address these various issues, but undermining the union itself is nothing more than Reagan-esque union-busting and so conveys and enacts hostility to student labor that can only heighten conflict and circulate a ruinous image for New York University as an unfair and indecent place of employment. The infiltration of student and faculty email constitutes an unauthorized invasion of privacy.And the most recent threat to rescind funding for students engaged in the strike constitutes an abhorrent form of coercion.

We urge you to enter into negotiations with the union and to find civil, legal, and productive ways of resolving whatever issues of employment exist between these two parties.

Sincerely,

Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Fredric Jameson, William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies, Duke University
Joan W. Scott, Harold F. Linder Professer of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study
Talal Asad, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
Paul Gilroy, Anthony Giddens Professors of Social Theory, London School of Economics
Donna Haraway, Professor of History of Consciousness, University of California at Santa Cruz
Slavoj Zizek, Co-Director International Center for Humanities Birkbeck College, University of London
Etienne Balibar, Professeur emeritus, Université de Paris X Nanterre, Distinguished Professor of Humanities, University of California, Irvine

EGO members may find it interesting to compare NYU's actions against the striking graduate students with former Chancellor Buzz Shaw's reaction to SU faculty that refused to cross the picket line in the 1997 service workers strike at SU. You can read about that by following the link at left for "1997 service worker strike."


By, the way, I know the guy who kinda looks like Sideshow Bob in this picture. He's a musicology PhD student. Brilliant kid.