AFL-CIO: Tell University Administrators to Stop Their Anti-Union Campaign
In the wake of the recent NLRB ruling permitting graduate teaching and research assistants at private universities to unionize, the Harvard Crimson reports that administrators and graduate students look forward to a meeting to discuss the way forward.
“We look forward to talking with the administration about having a free and fair union election, absent of influence from our employer,” HGSU-UAW spokesperson and Ph.D. student Jack M. Nicoludis wrote in an email.
However, Christian Sweeney, Deputy Director of Organizing, AFL-CIO, is not so optimistic and requests your support in advocating for fair play by administrations at all of our prestigious universities.
“…administrators at Columbia, Harvard, the New School and other prestigious private universities are doing everything they can to stop RAs and TAs from organizing” ~ Christian Sweeney, AFL-CIO
Christian writes in an AFL-CIO email appeal:
I got my start in the labor movement, taking a stand at my workplace. I was working as a teaching assistant and instructor at the University of California, Berkeley. We faced huge workloads, low pay and insecure health care.
My co-workers and I decided we had had enough and decided to organize to form a union to create a better workplace. It took several years but, with support from the UAW, we ended up getting university administrators to negotiate with us and created a better workplace as a result.
Unfortunately, tens of thousands of research assistants (RAs) and teaching assistants (TAs) still face such low pay that they have to work additional jobs and rely on loans to make ends meet. The good news is they’re organizing at universities across the country and a recent National Labor Relations Board decision restored the rights of research and teaching assistants at private universities to come together in union and negotiate collectively.
But administrators at Columbia, Harvard, the New School and other prestigious private universities are doing everything they can to stop RAs and TAs from organizing. They submitted legal arguments against the right of RAs and TAs to form a union and, when they lost, set up anti-union websites to get RAs and TAs to vote against forming a union.
This anti-union campaign is just another example of the greed we’re seeing at universities across the country. As tuition continues to skyrocket for students, administrators have raised their own salaries dramatically while shifting much of the critical teaching and research work to lower-paid, temporary workers, like RAs, TAs, adjuncts and postdocs.
Instead of recognizing the right of working people to organize together, they’re spending big money to spread misinformation in the hopes they can continue to pay TAs and RAs low wages.
In my years as an organizer assisting workers on campuses throughout the country, I have heard remarkable stories about the conditions these working people face. One TA at a private university in Washington, D.C., told me about how he severely injured his knee but could not afford the university’s health insurance or the surgery to repair it. On another campus, I heard complaints from a graduate student employee of sexual harassment that she dared not raise for fear of reprisals. RAs face very real workplace dangers, like exposure to carcinogens, radioactive materials and extreme fire hazards.
It’s no wonder that RAs and TAs are still trying to organize like my co-workers and I did years ago.