Yale and Columbia Grad Teachers Strike for Union Rights

Over 1,500 graduate teachers and union workers from New York, Connecticut and New Jersey left their posts in labs and lecture halls and rallied in New York Wednesday as part of a week-long strike for union recognition at the two campuses.

The group marched down Broadway in Manhattan, in an attempt to pressure the administrations of Yale and Columbia to recognize graduate teacher unions at the two schools. The strike by graduate teachers, TAs and research assistants is the first such multi-campus labor action in the history of the Ivy League.

The two unions – Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) at Yale and Graduate Student Employees United (GSEU) at Columbia – are fighting for collective bargaining power as legitimate employees of the elite universities. For years, the schools have refused to recognize the unions, saying that graduate teachers are not employees.

The graduate students have received endorsements from 43 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, seven members of the U.S. Senate, the American Association of University Professors, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Cornel West, as well as labor leaders nationwide. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney spoke at Wednesday’s rally, expressing the support of the national labor movement for the graduate teachers’ fight for recognition.

“All of us will be standing with you until we bring these two institutions -- which have gone from elite to elitist -- to their senses,” Sweeney told the crowd.

On Thursday, a rally was also held at New York University in support of the graduate union there, which is set to lose its contract with the school when it expires in August of this year.

Among the strikers are also several undergraduate students who say their education has been adversely impacted by what is known as the “casualization” of higher education.

“More and more classes are being taught by adjunct and temporary faculty,” said 21-year-old Yale undergraduate Lauren Burke. “In my senior year, I had to fight to get an advisor because the professors I’d worked with in previous years had all left the university.”

For grad teachers, a union contract would guarantee a fair stipend, decent health insurance, child care, and clear avenues through which they can address any issues they may have with the institution. A study done at Yale in 2003 found that one third of all undergraduate classes are taught by graduate teachers, roughly the same number that are taught by regular tenure-track faculty. Jay Driskell, a 32-year-old teaching assistant at Yale, teaches modern African history and is on strike for a fair contract and a living wage. “It takes six years of postsecondary education to be a TA,” he says, “and Yale could not educate its undergraduates without TAs.” This year, Driskell says, he will be paid only $16,000 to live on.

Like much of the temporary work force, grad student teachers are rarely given decent wages or adequate healthcare coverage, because they are “learning on the job. ”The graduate teacher unions suffered a major setback in July 2004, when the Republican-dominated National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that graduate teachers are not official employees of the universities for this reason.

Kirsten Weld, a 23-year-old first-year graduate student at Yale, said the NLRB decision looks bad for all kinds of workers. “It sets a dangerous precedent,” she said. “There are so many other jobs where one could be said to be learning first and working second – apprenticeships, residences – basically any job that is also a learning experience could be affected down the road by this decision.”