WHY I AM ON STRIKE

By Michelle Fawcett

When I moved to NYC to start a Ph.D. program at NYU in
2000, my biggest concern was not the rigors of
graduate study or the challenge of moving to another
new city alone. It was the fear of being unable to
survive economically.

Sure, I was going to work in addition to being a
student: as a graduate assistant, or GA, for my
department. GAs work as research assistants (RAs) or
teaching assistants (TAs).

The work of an RA might include co-editing an article
with a professor, but often it consists of
administrative duties such as making copies. I once
moved a professor’s office furniture on a dolly down
the middle of Broadway.

We also teach. Teaching assistants in my department
attend the course lecture (75% of more taught by
adjuncts across the university) and may teach several
recitations, which are sub-sections of the lecture. I
have had as many as 80 students across 3 recitations
that met weekly, for which I would prepare lectures,
host discussions, hold office hours, and grade stacks
of papers throughout the semester.

Prior to the union contract, I received $10,000 a year
in the form of biweekly paychecks. (Not sure where the
rest of the approximately $3,000,000 that my 80
students paid annually in tuition went.) As the
recipient of a wage income and therefore a worker
according to the IRS, I paid taxes on that $10,000.

Obviously, this was not enough to live on in NYC, so I
had to find other forms of support. Working outside of
the assistantship is logistically challenging because
as students we may also have a full course load,
comprehensive exams, and dissertation proposals, not
to mention children or other obligations.

Being the first to attend college in my working class
family, I had no economic cushion to fall back on, so
I applied for federal student loans. Since NYU counted
my free tuition as "income," however, I was eligible
for only a small loan. Enter the credit card.

Why do we struggle so? Because, unlike President John
Sexton and the NYU brass, we truly are passionately
devoted to academic freedom and advanced intellectual
inquiry, and we think the university should be the
place where we can pursue that.

But we need a living wage for our work, to do so we
need to be recognized as workers to get that wage, and
the union is our only voice to negotiate on equal
terms with a powerful and vastly wealthy institution.
NYU cannot advocate for us, nor can any form of
"student government." It’s that simple.

I joined the GSOC organizing committee early on, and
even though we won the right to form a union by NLRB
decision in 2000, we had to fight a resistant
administration every step of the way: NYU only came to
the bargaining table on the eve of a strike
authorization vote. We won a fair contract with
increases in stipends, full healthcare, workload
protection, childcare provisions, and many other
benefits. More importantly, we gained the power to
advocate for ourselves.

Upon expiration of our first contract this year,
however, NYU pronounced that it would not negotiate a
second contract: the university itself would willingly
continue and even expand the benefits that they now
claim were not the result of the union contract, but
of their own interest in remaining a competitive
institution! And even while they make this ridiculous
assertion, they have already started slashing those
very benefits, reducing health insurance coverage, for
example, directly after the expiration of the contract
in September.

We voted overwhelmingly to strike, and just three
weeks into our strike, President Sexton issued an
e-mail ultimatum on November 28th: striking workers
who do not return to work by December 5th will lose
their stipends and eligibility to teach in the spring;
those who agree to teach next spring, but who are
absent without approval from the dean, will be
suspended from assignments and lose their stipends for
two consecutive semesters.

This is especially threatening for international
students, whose visa status depends on guaranteed
income, since they cannot legally work outside of NYU.
Naturally NYU administration hoped this classic
union-busting strategy of intimidation would frighten
some back to work, enough to crush the strike and
return to business as usual. And it has scared us: our
jobs, our education, our status in this country, and
our future are on the line. But Sexton has now played
his final card and showed the administration’s true
colors: such a flagrant disregard for labor rights
demonstrates more than ever exactly why we need our
union.

And the ultimatum has even further ignited our
campaign: the labor movement, city and state elected
officials, faculty, and community leaders reaffirmed
their solid commitment for the duration of the strike
at a lively Dec. 2 rally on the picket line. City
Council members are freezing funds and permits for NYU
until it negotiates with us, parents of undergraduate
students are sending us unsolicited messages of
support, and academic departments are voting to not
replace striking labor.

This is not a battle within the ivory tower, as the
administration would like us to believe, and we are
not some privileged elite, as honored as we are to be
affiliated with our university. We work, we receive
paychecks, and we are entitled to the rights afforded
to workers, even if we happen to be employed by the
same institution that enrolls us as students.

This is truly an historic moment for graduate student
organizing, for the future of the university as an
institution, and the labor movement at large. We
believe that GSOC Local 2110 UAW will prevail, but we
need your support.

Join us on the picket line every day in front of Bobst
Library on Washington Square Park until we win our
second contract and go to http://www.2110uaw.org/gsoc
to find out more.

Michelle Fawcett is a community activist and a PhD
candidate at New York University. This article
originally appeared in the NYC Indypendent.

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2005/12/61614.html

Why GSOC is winning

by Gordon Lafer
Washington Square News
December 09, 2005

To an outside observer, the most dramatic fact about
the current strike may be that all signs suggest that
the Graduate Student Organizing Committee is on the
verge of a huge victory. Since this fact seems to be
counterintuitive to many people, it’s worth laying out
the reasons I think so.

First, the Draconian threats that the administration
has made — every one of which is illegal under federal
labor law — are impossible to carry out. The
university claims that its intimidation tactics have
succeeded in scaring three-quarters of GAs into giving
up the strike. This number may or may not be real —
they probably have no accurate way of knowing, and
given the history of administrative hyper-spin, it’s
probably exaggerated. But even if just 250 GAs keep
striking, the administration can’t afford to enact its
threats. If NYU President John Sexton were to ban 250
graduate students from teaching and cut all their
funding for the spring semester, some of them would be
forced to drop out, and some international students
would be forced to leave the country. Departments with
strong participation in the union might find their
graduate programs hurt. There would be an enormous
outcry of protest from both graduate students and
faculty.

Normally, people on strike do not get paid. That was
the "punishment" that GSOC members were prepared for.
But NYU has kept paying strikers for a strategic
reason. Everyone knows that the National Labor
Relations Board case may be re-litigated under a
Democratic president. Docking the pay of strikers would
make it apparent that NYU is paying GAs for work and
not giving them a stipend for scholarly training. The
administration’s strategic choice to keep paying
strikers made it easier for people to stay out. But it
certainly doesn’t give the administration the right to
turn to the thuggish tactic of blacklisting.

It is noteworthy that, in repeated resolutions, even
those faculty who are not necessarily pro-union are
nevertheless opposed to President Sexton’s threats.
This is unsurprising, since each of these threats
violates both labor law and the most basic principles
of academic freedom. If the administration enacted
these threats, they would set off a firestorm of
protest on campus.

Moreover, it would make NYU a pariah in the broader
academic community. There are already more than 5,000
academics from around the English-speaking world who
have signed statements condemning the threats, and the
American Association of University Professors has
already passed a resolution of censure against these
threats. Blacklisting a few hundred doctoral candidates
would jeopardize both future applications to NYU and
the school’s ability to recruit top-flight faculty.

When President Sexton issued his threats, he was
playing his final card — there is nowhere for the
administration to go from here. But this card is a
bluff. He played it with the hope of scaring GAs into
abandoning the strike soon enough that the threats
don’t have to be carried out. When GSOC called Sexton’s
bluff by voting to stay on strike past his deadline,
Sexton did the only thing he could do: He moved the
deadline back. It is no wonder that the administration
keeps grasping at any "alternative" strike-resolution
proposal that allows it to move its deadline back
further and further. Its only strategy is to keep
replaying the same bluff. But in the process, Sexton is
coming to look increasingly like Libyan strongman
Mouammar Qadaffi in an old Saturday Night Live skit —
"You cross this line, you die — OK, now, you cross
this line, you die!"

At the same time, the administration can’t afford to
let the strike go on forever. When a strike is truly
weak, employers simply ignore the strikers. This strike
is too strong for that. A few hundred classes haven’t
been taught, and thousands of grades have gone
unrecorded, which is an undigestible problem for a
university. The administration has come up with only
temporary band-aid solutions, like allowing
undergraduates to take incomplete or pass/fail grades
for this semester. Were the administration to go
further — using the midterm grades for final grades,
or letting students grade themselves — this would
undermine the academic integrity of the operation in a
way that would likely both ignite faculty protest and
create suspicion about the meaning of an NYU
transcript.

Behind all its bluster, the administration is caught
between a rock and a hard place. I don’t know whether
its threats of reprisals will succeed in intimidating
GSOC to abandon its demand for negotiations. But if
even a minority of the union’s 1,000 members stand
fast, the university will have little choice but to
return to the negotiating table. For those who are now
seeking some resolution to the strike — almost
everyone, that is — the best course of action by far
is to continue backing GSOC’s demand for recognition
and negotiations. Supporting GSOC at this critical
moment is not only the morally right thing to do — it
is also, by far, the most realistic strategy for
resolving the strike any time soon, and on terms that
preserve the bonds of community on campus and NYU’s
reputation in the outside world.

Gordon Lafer is a professor of labor studies at the
University of Oregon and a specialist on issues of
academic labor. He is visiting at NYU this fall. E-mail
responses to opinion@nyunews.com.
Why GSOC is winning

http://www.nyunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/12/09/43994c9713f07