Strike Averted As Grad Students Come To Tentative Agreement With NYU
NYU and its graduate student union reached a tentative contract agreement Tuesday morning, averting a graduate student workers strike scheduled for this week.
Officials from NYU and graduate student union GSOC met Monday night in a last-chance negotiation session that extended into early Tuesday morning. Graduate student workers had threatened to go on strike from Tuesday until Friday, if an agreement was not reached. Over the course of approximately five hours, representatives from NYU and GSOC debated salaries, benefits, and contract lengths, before successfully announcing an agreement at approximately 1:30am.
“I feel super-proud to come to this point after all the work we’ve done. We’ve fought tooth and nail, and it was really a testament to all the mobilization, all the direct action that we did,” Claudia Carrera, a GSOC member and second-year music Ph.D. candidate told Local. “We feel that it’s a major victory to get things from the university that they were saying weren’t possible a year ago.”
Approaching the bargaining session, GSOC’s contract goals included full health care coverage for all graduate student workers, increased salaries, childcare benefits, and a three-year contract. While Tuesday morning’s proposed contract is still tentative and is not expected to be confirmed until Wednesday, GSOC representatives indicated that the offer would provide significant increases in pay and benefits for graduate workers students on the Washington Square and Polytechnic School of Engineering campuses.
While their conclusion was serendipitous, the late-night negotiations often felt frantic, even doomed. A crowd of approximately fifty students arrived outside the negotiation rooms in support of the union, only to clash with NYU representatives as they walked into the private meetings. Marty Scheinman, NYU’s appointed negotiator for the meetings warned students that loud chanting outside NYU’s caucus room would not be tolerated.
Union negotiators also expressed frustration with early proceedings. “As it currently stands on the record, this is nothing,” a GSOC rep said of NYU’s second proposed contract of the night, which allegedly waived matriculation fees for graduate students, but added few additional benefits to previous offers.
As the night wore into morning, some GSOC negotiators became visibly irritated with Scheinman, alleging that the moderator was not allowing them enough time to discuss proposals. “What I’ll say is that NYU, as they have more or less been doing throughout the course of negotiations, been playing dirty and using various tactics that are very aggressive and unfair,” Carrera said about the dispute.
But just after 1am, Scheinman emerged from the meeting room with a smile. “Congratulations, you have a contract,” he told the students gathered in the lobby outside.
“NYU is very pleased to have reached a tentative agreement with the UAW. Let’s hope that very few students skipped studying for their midterms because they were banking on a strike,” NYU spokesperson John Beckman told Local.
“Since high school, my dream has been to become a professor. As I become a graduate student and earn so much debt, I’ve been really worried about going to graduate school,” said Robert Ascherman, and undergraduate attending to support GSOC. “As of tonight I can concretely say, yes I am going to go grad school, and yes, I will happily do it at NYU now. But when that time comes, I want NYU to know they should be afraid of me, because I know how to fight these contract fights, and we’ll win again.”
Photos by author.
