NYU Grad Student Union Votes In Favor of Authorizing a Strike
The vote was held as part of the union’s ongoing contract renewal negotiations with the university.
The Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC-UOA Local 2110) announced that 96.4% of its membership voted to authorize the union’s Bargaining Committee to call a strike during the ongoing contract renewal negotiations with NYU via an email sent on Friday, April 9.
The strike authorization vote is a product of a year-long series of meetings between the university and GSOC’s Bargaining Committee regarding the renewal of the contracts of 2,000 unionized teaching assistants, adjunct instructors, research assistants, and hourly workers, according to the GSOC website. The strike authorization would authorize the nine-person Bargaining Committee to call for a general strike for grad workers in its ongoing contract renewal negotiations with the university.
After a March 1 petition signed by 1,200 students that called on NYU to stop ‘stonewalling’ contract negotiation and a rally in Gould Plaza yielded minimal results in the negotiations, GSOC announced a three-week voting period beginning on March 23 during which GSOC union members cast their electronic secret ballots.
Though the stalemate of negotiations is indisputable, NYU attributes the slow progress to GSOC.
“It is the Union that has been responsible for the slow progress of bargaining,” NYU Spokesperson John Beckman said in an email to Local. “NYU has been bargaining seriously and in good faith for many months. To that end, NYU has made the kind of serious, substantive proposals that normally move a contract negotiation along expeditiously.”
However, student organizers across the university have continued to express their dissatisfaction with the university’s lack of urgency. GSOC’s strike authorization vote was announced shortly after the TAs of Tandon’s General Engineering class announced a strike for their course independently from GSOC, as the Tandon TAs are often undergraduate student workers.
“Discussions on increasing this wage have gone nowhere for the past two years, and we are tired of not receiving proper answers or support,” the April 7 strike document signed by 80 Tandon TAs reads. At the time of publication, Tandon spokesperson Sayar Lonial has not responded to a request for comment, or publicly recognized the strike.
GSOC remains unsatisfied with the university’s response to its eight basic contract demands: a living wage, free and expanded healthcare, cutting ties with the NYPD, immigration rules, a just contract, paid vacation leave, child care support, transportation access, and improved working conditions.
These eight demands date back to a survey report published by GSOC in February 2020 and are divided into 68 concrete proposals, 49 of which have been categorically rejected, 14 met by a counter-offer, and four agreed upon, according to a bargaining summary recorded by GSOC.
In addition to the economic issues central to GSOC’s demands, for the ongoing contract renegotiation, GSOC proposes more progressive measures from the university.
“Because of the freedom that was granted by the fact that we had a first contract agreed upon already, we can start taking on economic issues alongside more justice-oriented ones,” said Anila Gill, a Ph.D. candidate in Tisch’s Cinema Studies program and a member of GSOC’s bargaining committee, in a Zoom interview with Local.
According to GSOC, these kinds of demands are central to the ability of grad students to work since Black and brown students are disproportionately affected by police misconduct and violence. A March 18 bargaining session featured two student testimonials from Ph.D. candidates Amrit Trewn and Moné Makkawi, who endured harassment by the police and called on NYU to cut ties with the NYPD.
“We were very honored that they chose to share such vulnerable experiences with everyone at the bargaining table,” Gill said. “And yet again, NYU was impassive and refused to respond. Which is, personally for me, shameful.”
However, the university maintains that many of the demands are not feasible as GSOC’s social justice demands are secondary to the central issue of the contract.
“GSOC remains fixated on issues that are outside the scope of bargaining or on excessive demands, such as a near-doubling of hourly wages,” Beckman wrote. “Bargaining doesn’t mean that the University says ‘yes’ to every demand, no matter how unreasonable or costly.”
Beckman, who noted that NYU is “fully and wholly committed to doing more bargaining,” raised the issue of using a mediator, which has been a source of contention in the previous negotiation.
“NYU renews its call that GSOC agree to a neutral, mutually-agreed upon mediator, or offer the University community a frank explanation why they refuse again and again to make use of a longstanding practice in labor negotiations that is meant to help bring both sides together,” he wrote.
In the record of two previous negotiations, GSOC has declined to accept the mediator. “It [using a mediator] would significantly undermine our collective power,” reads an October 2020 GSOC Bargaining Update.
Nevertheless, despite the rocky state of negotiations between GSOC and NYU, many have shown their support for a possible graduate worker strike on social media including the NYC Tech Workers Coalition, The New Yorker Union, Alphabet Workers Union, and Contract Faculty United at NYU.
“For undergrads facing the possibility of their TA, or their adjunct instructors going on strike, the level of encouragement has been really heartwarming,” Gill said.
Now, with the strike authorization vote in, GSOC’s next step is to set up a strike deadline and attend an upcoming April 22 bargaining meeting in which GSOC hopes that the credible threat of the strike will encourage NYU to meet more of GSOC’s demands.
“NYU can’t run without our labor,” the strike vote announcement email reads. “That puts a ton of pressure on NYU to meet our demands.”
