But why should graduate students be unionized? Aren't unions for workers who aren't "professional" and who are less likely to be able to advocate for themselves? Why should some well-educated types be collectively bargaining?

NYU's graduate teaching assistants earn between $17,000 and $20,000 per year. Without the union now, their health care coverage has been cut. They are, along with adjunct and part time teachers, replacing full time well paid permament teachers in an increasing percentage of the university's classrooms. Without unionization, the university is as free as any corporate employer to hire cheap labor, slash benefits, and deny these workers a voice to negotiate on their own behalf.

In the knowledge/service economy, these teaching assistants *are* workers, and the university is acting just like a corporate employer. We need to ditch the image of the classic industrial worker as the proper subject for union organizing. Increasingly, the work force is composed of low paid "professional" and service workers who need union representation for all the classic reasons any disempowered workforce does.
LD

Lisa, this is a great piece. I'm still confused, though--could you please explain how NYU can do this while simultaneously claiming to be "a private university in the public interest?"

Lisa, thanks for this important conversation. Can you speak to the ways that this exploitative environment damages graduate student/professorial relations/dynamics and how this will hurt the production of scholars and teachers in the long run? I have found that the stressful and exploitative work conditions my graduate students are forced to endure seriously distract from their capacity to focus on their own work and scholarly development. For readers outside the university, even conditions not related to benefits/income are exploitative. For example: University reps assigning too many students per grad student. I had a course where each of my grad students had 100 undergrads assigned to them. The university refused to give me any further TA support for a course of over 400 undergrads. This requires that professors: 1) reduce the workload on grad students by cutting assignments and other "value" related to undergrad education; 2) take on additional work themselves (adding to an endless workday, already); 3)exploit graduate students by sustaining the status quo.

Can you speak to this aspect of the problem? Thanks!

What a lucid analysis -- let me add that universities, by opposing collective bargaining for graduate students, are laying the foundation for future generations of faculties who will see unions as a degraded or impossible choice. Given that NYU graduate students -- and those from other universities -- who are utterly vulnerable have had the courage to make this choice, what is it that has kept tenured faculty from attempting to organize? While colleagues will most often cite the Yeshiva decision as the principle reason organizing is "impossible," the law sometimes changes when it is challenged. A courageous stand by tenured faculty in universities across the country might well alter the playing field for graduate students, secretaries, janitors, and other workers. All of us need to get behind GESO/UAW at NYU, and we need to begin to think about its larger implications for our own status and ethicla engagement as laborers and educators.

Greenwhich Villager raises the question: is NYU's claim to be a "private university in the public interest?" a PR scam? It depends on who the relevant "public"is, doesn't it? In the case of the current strike breaking initiative, it appears that the "public" is those other private university administrations who wish to hold the line against teachers' unions--especially at Yale and Columbia. And if you are thinking that this is more of a "trust" of the kind one might hope to "bust" than a public interest.... Many here at NYU would have to agree.

Tricia Rose points to a primary reason that graduate student teaching assistants are turning to unionization--exploitative teaching loads that interfere with their scholarly training. Here at NYU, most of the Directors of Graduate Studies say that having the union *improved* working relations between faculty and students--rather than fraying them, as anti-union polemicists claimed would happen.

As to Claire Potter's dream of faculty unions appearing at long last at private universities despite the Yeshive decision...well, Faculty Democracy at NYU has a unionization committee. Maybe some day it will have something concrete to do?

LD

if these protesters are so against corporate management styles and what corporations stand for, why did they enroll in a PRIVATE college?