The Daily Pennsylvanian
NEW YORK -- The usually tranquil environment of Washington Square Park was disturbed last Wednesday as graduate students from around the country descended on the campus of New York University, rallying in support of the school's Graduate Student Organizing Committee.
Sporting red armbands and handmade signs, pro-union graduate students from Penn, Yale, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other universities chanted, "NYU, shame on you!" and vowed to fight the Aug. 31 expiration of a three-year-old contract between the NYU administration and its graduate-student union.
Protesters were joined by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, United Auto Workers Secretary-Treasurer Elizabeth Bunn, New York State Sen. Tom Duane (D-Manhattan) and actress Morgan Fairchild in their attempt to block access to the school's Elmer Holmes Bobst Library.
By the end of the event, 77 students and supporters had been arrested by New York police. The police were informed of the pre-planned civil disobedience, and at least two dozen officers, including members of the NYPD's crowd-control unit, were on hand to make the arrests. Those arrested were charged with disorderly conduct and will appear before a judge in October.
Collective bargaining became the norm at NYU after a 2000 National Labor Relations Board decision classified the school's graduate students as workers, allowing them to unionize and negotiate compensation and benefits.
In its contract, the union -- Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers -- received a 40 percent increase in stipends, paid health benefits and negotiated agreements on many quality-of-life issues such as workloads, training and child-care.
In the summer of 2004, however, the NLRB effectively reversed this ruling, determining that graduate students at Brown University were not entitled to unionize. The reversal led to NYU's refusal to negotiate a new agreement with its teaching assistants.
NYU President John Sexton has charged the union with unfair bargaining practices, including abuse of grievance procedures and demanding oversight of teaching appointments. However, despite the controversy, NYU officials seemed unperturbed by the rally. They provided bottled water and snacks to the protesters, and the Bobst Library remained open and accessible.
Kristin Ross, a professor of comparative literature at NYU, was one of dozens of faculty members who joined the rally in support of the students. Ross cited the TAs' "democratic right of self-determination" as a motivating factor behind her participation. The students are "very, very committed to their cause and will do anything [to preserve their rights], despite the administration's scare talk," she said. Ross does not believe that the unionization of graduate teachers has affected the quality of an NYU education and noted that a majority of the faculty supports GSOC's efforts.
Columbia University law students Annie Hsu, Rob Bickel and Darin Dalmat also joined their peers in the protest. The three, who are members of Columbia's Student Labor Action Project -- which provides legal assistance to labor movements in the New York area -- echoed the feelings of many at the rally who blamed partisan politics for the controversial 3-2 NLRB ruling in the Brown case.
"The National Labor Relations Board is the most politicized of all the government's agencies," Bickel said.
"Its decisions are determined by the administration" in the White House, Dalmat added, "not normal legal reasoning."
Although NLRB decisions have the force of law, the ruling in the Brown case does not prevent NYU from continuing to bargain with GSOC; the university is simply no longer obligated to do so.
"It's embarrassing," Hsu said. "We go to these schools that teach us all about democracy and human rights and then don't follow through on those principles."
Columbia's Graduate Student Employees United has had its own difficulties. When GSEU joined Yale University's Graduate Employees and Students Organization in an April 2005 joint walkout, school administrators suggested that individual departments could retaliate against the work-stoppage by reducing stipends and delaying graduation to compensate for time spent on the picket lines.
Thus far, NYU had been the nation's only private university to recognize its graduate student union. In 1969, the University of Wisconsin became the first public institution of higher learning to recognize such an organization.
