Graduate Student Organizing Committee
Encyclopedia
The Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) is a labor union
representing graduate teaching
and research assistant
s at New York University
(NYU).
GSOC is affiliated with the Technical, Office, and Professional Union, United Auto Workers
Local 2110, an amalgamated union that also represents employees at the Village Voice newspaper, the American Civil Liberties Union
, the Museum of Modern Art
, and several other locations.
In 2000, the National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB) unanimously ruled that graduate assistants were statutory “employees” under the National Labor Relations Act
. As well, it stipulated that NYU was obliged to enter into collective bargaining negotiations with GSOC after a majority of graduate employees at the university voted in favor of the union in an NLRB election.
In accordance with federal labor relations law and motions made by NYU and GSOC, the bargaining unit represented by GSOC in contract negotiations did not include graduate students who were primarily funded by private fellowships, those whose funding was not contingent on the performance of any work, and some other categories.
In 2002, GSOC and NYU negotiated the first graduate assistant union contract at an American private university. (Many public universities already had union contracts under state labor laws.) The three-year contract increased stipends (dramatically for some), instituted a health care plan, and created a third-party arbitration procedure for economic disputes.
. The Republican
-controlled board stated in their decision that "there is a significant risk, even a strong likelihood, that the collective-bargaining process will be detrimental to the educational process." The dissenting opinion stated that "Today's decision is woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality", and further that "It disregards the plain language of" Section 2(3) of the National Labor Relations Act, which "defines employees so broadly that graduate students who perform services for, and under the control of, their universities are easily covered". Soon thereafter, NYU asked members of the university community for feedback regarding whether it ought to negotiate a second contract with GSOC upon the August 31, 2005 expiration of the first.
On August 5, 2005, NYU announced its decision not to negotiate with GSOC. Its primary grounds for this decision were the claim that GSOC had filed several grievances on non-academic matters regarding teaching assignments and that it had offered to negotiate with GSOC as long as the union would agree, before the start of negotiations, to surrender the previous contract’s third-party arbitration
and agency shop
provisions and become an "open shop" union, common in many southern states but largely without precedent in New York. However, on an official website devoted to the labor dispute, NYU to date has only cited two "non-academic" grievances, both of which were decided in the University's favor by an independent arbitrator appointed by both sides.
In response, GSOC argued that without rights to third-party contract arbitration and an agency-shop provision, the contract offer would render the union virtually powerless to represent its members, a union in name only. The union also dismissed NYU's claims of disruptive grievances, arguing that the grievances to which the administration referred were economic disputes in which some graduate students were given the same jobs as in previous semesters, but reclassified as lower-paid adjunct professors not covered by the union contract. The union argued that this was not only damaging to graduate employees' wages and benefits, but a deliberate tactic to weaken the union by depriving it of members. The union also said that the administration had only given it 48 hours to respond to its “ultimatum” and that the GSOC leadership, due to union policy, could not agree to contract terms without the consent of their members.
After several months without a contract, GSOC held a strike vote in which, according to GSOC representatives, 85 percent of those voting approved a strike. The strike began on November 9, 2005 and lasted through the entire spring semester. It is thought to have been the longest strike by academic workers at a college or university in U.S. history.
In response to the Brown decision, NYU’s decision not to negotiate, the strike, and the administration’s response, several GSOC-supportive groups have formed at NYU to call upon president John Sexton
to end the strike by negotiating a new contract. More than 200 faculty members - including prominent physicist
Alan Sokal
, who has written several essays voicing his opinion on the situation - have joined a group called Faculty Democracy http://www.facultydemocracy.org.
Student support of GSOC has been mixed. Undergraduates supporting GSOC have formed Graduate/Undergraduate Solidarity, and law students have formed Law/Grad Solidarity.
The unions of adjunct faculty members, office support staff, security personnel, and other NYU employees have variously supported GSOC.
On April 27, 2006, GSOC announced at a membership convention that a public majority of its members continued to support the union and had signed a petition which called on the University Leadership Team to bargain a second contract. After the convention, 43 GSOC members and 14 supporters engaged in an act of civil disobedience and were arrested for blocking traffic.
GSOC members resumed their teaching duties on September 5, 2006 (the first day of classes for the 2006-2007 academic year), officially ending their six-month-long strike without receiving a second contract or winning back administrative recognition of the union's collective bargaining rights. The administration had recognized these rights prior to the August 31, 2005 contract expiration.http://www.nyunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/44fe7f1e23e15
GSOC, through the UAW, funded a failed lawsuit against the developer of a future NYU dorm. http://www.nyunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/10/04/45233bd7de435 The plaintiffs in the lawsuit were community members, but a large portion of the legal fees were provided by the UAW, which was not named on the lawsuit. The suit was dismissed on Sept. 22, 2006.
Several actions taken by the Sexton administration during the strike have sparked strong opposition among many faculty, students, and observers, including some who are not supportive of GSOC. Others, including some administrators, parents, undergraduates, have said that GSOC's strike is an unnecessary disruption to the academic process.
Soon after the strike began, several NYU administrators discreetly signed on as instructors to the Blackboard
course management systems for courses with teaching assistants in order to monitor the impact of the strike. When the professors teaching these classes discovered this, a strong reaction among faculty against this perceived violation of academic freedom
forced a reversal of the move.
In November 2005, NYU announced that graduate assistants who remained on strike past the fall 2005 semester would be locked out
of working and receiving their stipends for one or two semesters. The university promised to fully fund tuition and healthcare, regardless of an individual GA's decision on whether to strike.
In January 2006, Sexton followed through with the measures, revoking the stipends of 23 striking graduate students for two semesters. However, in late February 2006, 15 of the 23 punished GAs received letters stating that their fall stipends would be restored. Grievances filed by these blacklisted GAs through the university's new non-union "interim" grievance procedure in early 2006 remained unadressed as late as December 23, 2006.
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
representing graduate teaching
Teaching assistant
A teaching assistant is an individual who assists a professor or teacher with instructional responsibilities. TAs include graduate teaching assistants , who are graduate students; undergraduate teaching assistants , who are undergraduate students; secondary school TAs, who are either high school...
and research assistant
Research assistant
A research assistant is a researcher employed, often on a temporary contract, by a university or a research institute, for the purpose of assisting in academic research...
s at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
(NYU).
GSOC is affiliated with the Technical, Office, and Professional Union, United Auto Workers
United Auto Workers
The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, better known as the United Auto Workers , is a labor union which represents workers in the United States and Puerto Rico, and formerly in Canada. Founded as part of the Congress of Industrial...
Local 2110, an amalgamated union that also represents employees at the Village Voice newspaper, the American Civil Liberties Union
American Civil Liberties Union
The American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...
, the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, and several other locations.
Formation and first contract
GSOC is one of several labor organizations of graduate student teachers and researchers that formed at private universities in the 1990s. It is the first graduate employee union at a private U.S. university to have achieved collective bargaining unit recognition and negotiated a contract. (The contract expired in 2005 and the collective bargaining relationship with the university is scuttled.) When GSOC began to organize in the late 1990s, members believed that shifts in the academic labor market, including greater reliance on graduate student teaching and research, made necessary the formation of collective bargaining units. Members also sought a collective voice in their pay and working conditions.In 2000, the National Labor Relations Board
National Labor Relations Board
The National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency of the United States government charged with conducting elections for labor union representation and with investigating and remedying unfair labor practices. Unfair labor practices may involve union-related situations or instances of...
(NLRB) unanimously ruled that graduate assistants were statutory “employees” under the National Labor Relations Act
National Labor Relations Act
The National Labor Relations Act or Wagner Act , is a 1935 United States federal law that limits the means with which employers may react to workers in the private sector who create labor unions , engage in collective bargaining, and take part in strikes and other forms of concerted activity in...
. As well, it stipulated that NYU was obliged to enter into collective bargaining negotiations with GSOC after a majority of graduate employees at the university voted in favor of the union in an NLRB election.
In accordance with federal labor relations law and motions made by NYU and GSOC, the bargaining unit represented by GSOC in contract negotiations did not include graduate students who were primarily funded by private fellowships, those whose funding was not contingent on the performance of any work, and some other categories.
In 2002, GSOC and NYU negotiated the first graduate assistant union contract at an American private university. (Many public universities already had union contracts under state labor laws.) The three-year contract increased stipends (dramatically for some), instituted a health care plan, and created a third-party arbitration procedure for economic disputes.
2005-2006 strike
In 2004, a newly constituted NLRB voted 3-2 to reverse its 2000 NYU decision in a case involving graduate assistants at Brown UniversityBrown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
. The Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
-controlled board stated in their decision that "there is a significant risk, even a strong likelihood, that the collective-bargaining process will be detrimental to the educational process." The dissenting opinion stated that "Today's decision is woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality", and further that "It disregards the plain language of" Section 2(3) of the National Labor Relations Act, which "defines employees so broadly that graduate students who perform services for, and under the control of, their universities are easily covered". Soon thereafter, NYU asked members of the university community for feedback regarding whether it ought to negotiate a second contract with GSOC upon the August 31, 2005 expiration of the first.
On August 5, 2005, NYU announced its decision not to negotiate with GSOC. Its primary grounds for this decision were the claim that GSOC had filed several grievances on non-academic matters regarding teaching assignments and that it had offered to negotiate with GSOC as long as the union would agree, before the start of negotiations, to surrender the previous contract’s third-party arbitration
Arbitration
Arbitration, a form of alternative dispute resolution , is a legal technique for the resolution of disputes outside the courts, where the parties to a dispute refer it to one or more persons , by whose decision they agree to be bound...
and agency shop
Agency shop
An agency shop is a form of union security agreement where the employer may hire union or non-union workers, and employees need not join the union in order to remain employed. However, the non-union worker must pay a fee to cover collective bargaining costs...
provisions and become an "open shop" union, common in many southern states but largely without precedent in New York. However, on an official website devoted to the labor dispute, NYU to date has only cited two "non-academic" grievances, both of which were decided in the University's favor by an independent arbitrator appointed by both sides.
In response, GSOC argued that without rights to third-party contract arbitration and an agency-shop provision, the contract offer would render the union virtually powerless to represent its members, a union in name only. The union also dismissed NYU's claims of disruptive grievances, arguing that the grievances to which the administration referred were economic disputes in which some graduate students were given the same jobs as in previous semesters, but reclassified as lower-paid adjunct professors not covered by the union contract. The union argued that this was not only damaging to graduate employees' wages and benefits, but a deliberate tactic to weaken the union by depriving it of members. The union also said that the administration had only given it 48 hours to respond to its “ultimatum” and that the GSOC leadership, due to union policy, could not agree to contract terms without the consent of their members.
After several months without a contract, GSOC held a strike vote in which, according to GSOC representatives, 85 percent of those voting approved a strike. The strike began on November 9, 2005 and lasted through the entire spring semester. It is thought to have been the longest strike by academic workers at a college or university in U.S. history.
In response to the Brown decision, NYU’s decision not to negotiate, the strike, and the administration’s response, several GSOC-supportive groups have formed at NYU to call upon president John Sexton
John Sexton
John Edward Sexton is the fifteenth President of New York University, having held this position since May 17, 2002, and the Benjamin Butler Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law. From 1988 to 2002, he served as Dean of the NYU School of Law, which during his deanship became one...
to end the strike by negotiating a new contract. More than 200 faculty members - including prominent physicist
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
Alan Sokal
Alan Sokal
Alan David Sokal is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. To the general public he is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in...
, who has written several essays voicing his opinion on the situation - have joined a group called Faculty Democracy http://www.facultydemocracy.org.
Student support of GSOC has been mixed. Undergraduates supporting GSOC have formed Graduate/Undergraduate Solidarity, and law students have formed Law/Grad Solidarity.
The unions of adjunct faculty members, office support staff, security personnel, and other NYU employees have variously supported GSOC.
On April 27, 2006, GSOC announced at a membership convention that a public majority of its members continued to support the union and had signed a petition which called on the University Leadership Team to bargain a second contract. After the convention, 43 GSOC members and 14 supporters engaged in an act of civil disobedience and were arrested for blocking traffic.
GSOC members resumed their teaching duties on September 5, 2006 (the first day of classes for the 2006-2007 academic year), officially ending their six-month-long strike without receiving a second contract or winning back administrative recognition of the union's collective bargaining rights. The administration had recognized these rights prior to the August 31, 2005 contract expiration.http://www.nyunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/44fe7f1e23e15
GSOC, through the UAW, funded a failed lawsuit against the developer of a future NYU dorm. http://www.nyunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/10/04/45233bd7de435 The plaintiffs in the lawsuit were community members, but a large portion of the legal fees were provided by the UAW, which was not named on the lawsuit. The suit was dismissed on Sept. 22, 2006.
Controversies
The GSOC strike has caused various disruptions across campus, including canceled classes, classes moved to off-campus locations http://www.nyunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/11/02/43686bf2ae7f3, class boycotts, and protests inside Bobst Library http://www.nyunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/12/01/438e9ca6e73c7. Sympathy for the GSOC strike also kept some speakers and recruiters from participating in campus events. http://www.nyunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2006/02/16/43f436b7cbbf6?in_archive=1Several actions taken by the Sexton administration during the strike have sparked strong opposition among many faculty, students, and observers, including some who are not supportive of GSOC. Others, including some administrators, parents, undergraduates, have said that GSOC's strike is an unnecessary disruption to the academic process.
Soon after the strike began, several NYU administrators discreetly signed on as instructors to the Blackboard
Virtual learning environment
Defined largely by usage, the term virtual learning environment has most, if not all, of the following salient properties:* It is Web-based* It uses Web 2.0 tools for rich 2-way interaction* It includes a content management system...
course management systems for courses with teaching assistants in order to monitor the impact of the strike. When the professors teaching these classes discovered this, a strong reaction among faculty against this perceived violation of academic freedom
Academic freedom
Academic freedom is the belief that the freedom of inquiry by students and faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy, and that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment.Academic freedom is a...
forced a reversal of the move.
In November 2005, NYU announced that graduate assistants who remained on strike past the fall 2005 semester would be locked out
Lockout (industry)
A lockout is a work stoppage in which an employer prevents employees from working. This is different from a strike, in which employees refuse to work.- Causes :...
of working and receiving their stipends for one or two semesters. The university promised to fully fund tuition and healthcare, regardless of an individual GA's decision on whether to strike.
In January 2006, Sexton followed through with the measures, revoking the stipends of 23 striking graduate students for two semesters. However, in late February 2006, 15 of the 23 punished GAs received letters stating that their fall stipends would be restored. Grievances filed by these blacklisted GAs through the university's new non-union "interim" grievance procedure in early 2006 remained unadressed as late as December 23, 2006.
See also
- Coalition of Graduate Employee UnionsCoalition of Graduate Employee UnionsThe Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions consists of unions representing graduate employees at universities in Canada and the United States...
- Graduate Employees and Students OrganizationGraduate Employees and Students OrganizationThe Graduate Employees and Students Organization is a group of graduate student teachers and researchers which is trying to be recognized as a union at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut....
- Graduate Employees Together - University of Pennsylvania
- National Labor Relations BoardNational Labor Relations BoardThe National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency of the United States government charged with conducting elections for labor union representation and with investigating and remedying unfair labor practices. Unfair labor practices may involve union-related situations or instances of...