Graduate assistants at New York University went on strike Nov. 9 after the university refused to renegotiate the GAs' union contract, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In 2004 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that federal labor laws did not cover graduate assistants. NYU decided this summer not to renegotiate the 2001 contract with the United Automobile Workers' Union, which represents the GAs. NYU is the only private university in the country to have unionized graduate students.
According to e-mails sent to the NYU community by university President John Sexton, the core issues behind not re-negotiating the contract are economic and academic.
The auto-workers union refused to agree to a contract with NYU in which graduate assistants could choose to be exempted from the union without losing their contracts, and NYU refused to allow GA involvement in academic issues within their classes.
According to these emails, the average financial package for a doctoral student acting as a GA is valued at over $50,000 a year.
An NYU student who wished to remain anonymous due to the controversial nature of the issue said a large number of her fellow classmates and professors supported the strike, going so far as to pass out cookies and other food to the picketers to show solidarity. The student said that the core issue was whether the GAs were students receiving financial aid, or students who were also employees of the university and thereby entitled to a contract with health benefits, guaranteed pay and living expenses.
According to the Chronicle, up to 400 professors are holding their classes off campus at churches and apartments so as to avoid crossing the GAs' picket lines. Graduate students from Columbia and Yale Universities and the University of Pennsylvania joined the NYU protestors. The organizers said they are prepared to strike for weeks or even months.
In his e-mails to the NYU community, President Sexton said every effort to minimize the disruption would be made, but the NYU student who spoke to The Eagle said the GAs were making a scene, chanting and banging on empty water jugs in front of all the major buildings on campus. The student said she disagreed with the GA strike, and the GAs were trying to turn NYU into a "ghost campus" during a time when many prospective students visit the school.
"They are students, and they get a better package than lots of public high school teachers' wages who have kids and a spouse to support," the student said. "They choose to go to school for longer, and they choose to become a graduate assistant. No one makes them do so."
Mike Dickel, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, has worked as both a teaching assistant and a General Education Faculty Assistant. As a general TA for a tenured professor, he was compensated $9 an hour, and the number of hours was regulated through the department.
As part of the general education faculty assistant program, he was allotted a certain number of hours of work per semester and paid somewhere between $9 and $10 an hour. If he went over that number of hours in his work, he was not compensated for the overtime, but Dickel said the number of allotted hours was usually enough.
Paul Harrel, a graduate student at AU, is a first-year graduate assistant and teaches a psychology lab section. When a graduate student enrolls in a graduate assistant program with a stipend, the stipend is guaranteed for a specific amount of time, but without the possibility of a raise, he said.
"Graduate students who work in a lab or as a teaching assistant are somewhere in between students and employees," he said. "... This work is often very extensive and time consuming."
Peter Kuznick, an AU history professor who has several graduate assistants, said he was not familiar with the NYU strike, but expressed his support for unionization and contracts for teaching and graduate assistants.
"Clearly universities depend on cheap labor from teaching assistants," Kuznick said. "NYU is a very wealthy university, so there is no justification to squeeze more work out of students who are already working hard"
