Renewed Call to Support Yale/Columbia Graduate Student Strike
April 19, 2005
Grad students at two top Ivy League US universities - Yale and Columbia - have voted for a five-day strike starting Monday 18 April because they're demanding the right to organise a union.
The Bush-run National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently stripped the graduate teaching and research assistants of their legal protections for organising unions at private US universities.
In a partisan 3-2 decision, the three appointees of President Bush denied these workers union rights - and struck a major blow to the freedom of association enshrined in the US constitution.
This dispute, which is becoming a high-profile fight, involves several Australians playing key roles in the union-rights campaign.
Among them:
Brangwen Stone, a graduate student in the Yale German Department and a graduate of the University of Melbourne
Daniel Mulino, a graduate teacher in the Yale Economics Department and a graduate of ANU (Arts/Law) and Sydney University (Master of Economics).
“My mother is a member of the NTEU, so I know first-hand how important unions are in defending university workers”, Brangwen Stone said.
“I think that Australians should care about this fight because it seems like the US approach to labour is becoming more prevalent throughout the world.”
Australia is especially on Yale's radar screen. There are 31 students in Yale graduate schools from Australia. This is the twelfth largest population of international students at Yale and includes students from the Australian National University, University of Melbourne and Sydney University with most of them being signed-up union members.
The two US union locals at the centre of this strike are GESO at Yale and GSEU at Columbia. Both are part of the progressive activist labour unions (UNITE HERE for GESO and UAW for GSEU) famous for their successful and aggressive organising drives.
These unions are reaching across the globe to help win these fights at Yale and Columbia because these two Ivy League universities promote themselves as global institutions.
“Yale and Columbia are marketing themselves to the world in order to get cheap graduate labor. We want the world to know the real working conditions on campus”, Ben Begleiter of UNITE-HERE said.
In recent weeks UNITE-HERE have informed the leadership of the National Tertiary Education Union here in Australia about the history of the dispute.
The NTEU has asked all their university branches across Australia to send messages of solidarity to show their support for this struggle.
The NLRB's decision to cut down union organising drives followed the desire of Presidents Levin of Yale and Bollinger of Columbia University.
Yale’s President Levin has been a leader in opposing the unionisation of graduate teachers while at the same time, steering his university towards close alliances with for-profit corporations.
President Levin of Yale is particularly close to the Bush White House.
Levin was the first overnight guest of the Bush White House and was appointed by Bush to the WMD Commission.
On both campuses, strong majorities of graduate employees have stated their preference to deal with these issues by forming a union and bargaining a contract with their employer.
This majority preference in favour of unionisation on both campuses has been certified by public officials in New York and Connecticut.
"Democracy has a place in every workplace," Bob Proto of UNITE/HERE Local 35, which represents service and maintenance workers at Yale, said.
"The goal of this job action is to convince administrators at Yale and Columbia to respect the rights of their own teachers."
The key issues in the dispute:
- A Living Wage for graduate teachers. Without a Living Wage many lower income students cannot afford to attend graduate schools. This is especially critical for married international students who, because of US labour law, are the sole source of financial support for their families
- Fighting for affordable healthcare for union members and their families.
- Fighting for visa reform to enable international students to travel to and from their home countries more easily.
- Fighting against racism, sexism and discrimination of all sorts. See the Yale Unions most recent report on women and minority hiring in Ivy League universities (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton etc):
www.yaleunions.org/geso/reports/Ivy.pdf.
Act Now: Show your support for this dispute and send an e-mail to the Presidents of Yale and Columbia with this special LabourStart campaign:
http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=47
For more information contact:
Mark Probst on (03) 9254 1910 or at mprobst@nteu.org.au
Alex Schlotzer on (03) 9254 1910 or at aschlotzer@nteu.org.au
Visit GESO online at www.yaleunions.org/geso/
Visit GSEU online at www.2110uaw.org/gseu/
Read the first statement released by the NTEU about this important issue here