Graduate students at Yale and Columbia universities began a coordinated weeklong strike Monday to protest their administrations' opposition to the unionization of teaching and research assistants.
"We at Columbia and Yale felt very strongly that we wanted to send a message to our respective university presidents, and to President Bush, that graduate teachers still demand the right to unionize on their campuses," said Rachel Sulkes, a spokesperson for the Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale.
The strikes come after a National Labor Relations Board ruling in July, in a case brought by the Brown University administration, that Brown graduate students are not University employees and do not have the right to unionize.
GESO at Yale and Graduate Student Employees United at Columbia have urged all graduate students who work as teaching or research assistants not to work this week, and all other graduate students not to attend class in support.
Student organizers were optimistic after Monday's protests, the first multi-campus strike by Ivy League graduate student teachers.
"I'm pretty excited. A lot of people came out and it's a beautiful day, and we had a lot of local politicians - Connecticut politicians - come out and support us. So it was a pretty positive day," Sulkes said.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz and U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, all Democrats, joined the striking students at Yale Monday, according to a GESO press release and Associated Press reports.
Sulkes said about half of Yale's 700 teaching assistants were out Monday, and she expects that number to increase over the course of the week. She said about 450 classes were affected, and some were canceled.
She said the Yale picket line would continue through this week, and on Wednesday 10 busloads of students will go to New York City to join Columbia students for a labor march and rally.
Representatives from GSEU at Columbia did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The graduate students at Yale and Columbia are seeking to unionize so they can bargain collectively with their respective universities. They argue that work done as teaching assistants, research assistants and proctors qualifies them as employees of the university rather than as students.
But university officials remain opposed to recognizing the student unions.
"I don't think it's productive to speculate right now, but (Columbia's) position is very clear: The university's relationship with graduate students is an educational and collaborative one, rather than an employer-employee relationship, and this is the view endorsed by the NLRB and its July 2004 ruling," said Alissa Kaplan Michaels, a senior public affairs officer at Columbia.
"It's (Yale's) position that a graduate student union would not be in the best interests of the students or higher education, and that is the opinion of other private universities as well," said Tom Conroy, a spokesman for Yale. "The activities by GESO this week are not going to alter the university's viewpoint," he added.
The Yale graduate students are backed by UNITE HERE, a union of textile, hotel, restaurant and industrial employees with more than 440,000 active members, according to its Web site. The Columbia students are backed by United Auto Workers Local 2110, a union representing clerical workers at Columbia as well as other office workers in New York, with over 3,000 members, according to its Web site.
"We are fully behind the graduate employees at Columbia and Yale, and behind all graduate employees and all employees who want to form unions in the United States," said Andy Levin, director of the "Voices@Work" program at the AFL-CIO. "It's perfectly legal for Columbia and Yale and Brown ... to recognize and work with unions," as many public universities, such as the University of California, do, Levin said.
Chris Hu '06, a leader of the Student Labor Alliance at Brown, said the SLA is "in solidarity" with the striking graduate students at Yale and Columbia, but no specific actions to support the strikers have been organized.
"Unfortunately, it's because of the actions of the Brown administration that it's so difficult for grad students to organize at private universities," Hu added.
The NLRB, the federal authority for labor-management disputes, had ruled for decades that graduate students who assisted with teaching, testing and research at private schools were not employees of the university they attended and thus did not have the right to unionize.
This precedent was overturned by a unanimous vote of the five-person NLRB in 2000, when it ruled that New York University graduate students met the National Labor Relations Act's requirements for being considered employees and could form a union.
Students at several private universities began to organize, including at Brown. In November 2001, the NLRB ruled that Brown graduate students could vote on whether to unionize, and that vote was held the next month.
The ballots were never counted, however, as the University immediately filed an appeal with the NLRB and the votes were impounded.
In July 2004 the NLRB, in a 3-2 decision along party lines with a Republican majority, overturned its 2000 ruling and declared that graduate students did not have the right to unionize. The majority ruling declared, "It is clear to us that graduate student assistants, including those at Brown, are primarily students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university."
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney condemned the decision, saying in a statement, "The Bush board (has) overturned precedent and ignored overwhelming evidence of the transformation of colleges and universities into large-scale employers of low-wage academic workers."
But Brown Provost Robert Zimmer praised the decision in a written statement, saying, "The NLRB correctly recognizes that a graduate student's experience is a mentoring relationship between faculty and students, and is not a matter appropriate for collective bargaining."
Mark Nickel, director of the Brown News Service, said the University had no official comment on the strikes at Columbia and Yale.
According to Hu, the unionization movement among Brown graduate students has been dormant since the July ruling.
"As far as I know, since that decision, there hasn't been much of a movement among grad students," he said. "As far as I know, they're pretty much disorganized right now."
"I think it's mostly because the University used the delaying tactic" of the NLRB appeal, Hu said. "While the appeal was going through over the course of two or three years, the energy sort of petered out" of the movement, and it is "hard to get something going in this new, hostile environment," he said.
Levin, from the AFL-CIO, noted "the transitory nature of the work force" as graduate students earn degrees and move on, and also the mental pressure of carrying on an organizing movement against such opposition. "The thing that's amazing isn't that Brown grads gave up but that others carried on," he said.
"We're back to the future here. ... The situation for all workers organizing right now is like it was in the 1920s and 30s here, when you had to go out and just organize because the law is not on your side," Levin said.
