NYU Administration Takes Action against Strikers
By Erika Gubrium
Administrators at New York University terminated the stipends and teaching positions of twenty-three striking graduate employees for the spring semester after the strikers refused to return to work. Administrators also suggested that strikers might be banned from employment in future semesters, but appeared to be retreating from that position as of press time, when some strikers had received teaching assignments for the fall. Graduate employees at NYU have been on strike since November in response to the administration’s refusal to continue negotiations with the graduate employee union.
Over the past two decades, dozens of graduate employee unions have gained the legal right to represent graduate assistants concerning the terms and conditions of their employment. Many unions continue to seek these recognition rights. The graduate employee union at NYU stands alone within a third category; it was granted legal recognition by the National Labor Relations Board in 2001, but this decision was overturned after new members were appointed to the board in 2004. While the 2004 decision did not preclude the NYU administration from recognizing the graduate employee union, the administration has chosen not to do so. NYU president John Sexton said that he would deal with departmentally elected graduate assistants on “stipend levels, health-care benefits, and other matters of importance,” but that he will not work with the union, which he characterized as an “intermediary” between the administration and the graduate students.
The AAUP supports the right of graduate employees to unionize if they so choose and has issued several statements on the rights of the striking employees. A statement endorsed by seventeen prominent academics in the fields of labor law, labor history, and industrial relations cited the fundamental worker protections embodied within the Wagner Act of 1935 and decried the NYU administration’s “expressed unwillingness to accept what is universally regarded in the free world as a fundamental right”—the right of employees to bargain collectively through a representative of their own choosing.
The AAUP’s Committee on Graduate and Professional Students released a separate statement urging the NYU administration to afford due process protections in its dealings with striking NYU graduate assistants, and to recognize their right to choose their own representative for collective bargaining. The committee expressed concern that “NYU’s failure to recognize a democratically elected employee union on campus violates a fundamental human right recognized more than fifty years ago by the international community” and that “the administration’s actions with respect to individual graduate employees may have breached numerous policy standards established by the AAUP in our ongoing efforts to protect and preserve academic freedom and due process rights throughout the higher education community.” The committee urged the NYU administration to afford hearings for any teaching assistants who may be dismissed from teaching appointments for cause, agree to follow AAUP procedures, and recognize and negotiate with the NYU graduate students’ choice of union.
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