From: Rachel Edelman (rachel_790@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Feb 19 2002 - 14:56:33 EST
----- Original Message -----
From: Amber Gallup
To: usas@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2002 1:23 PM
Subject: [usas] SU Grad Employees Say "We LOVE the UNION!"; begin drive
This ROCKS .... Please forward to all local, regional, and related lists....
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SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE EMPLOYEES DRIVE FOR SEIU UNION REPRESENTATION!
Happy Valentine's Day: We LOVE the Union!
We're goin' for it!!!
and THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING!
Zac M.
Syruckus U.
---------------------
***PLEASE FORWARD****
THE DAILY ORANGE
www.dailyorange.com
2/14/02
Graduate student TAs to start union
By Brendon Fleming
A group of Syracuse University graduate student
teaching assistants hopes to establish a union to bargain collectively with the
administration for improved compensation and working conditions, members
of the TA organizing group said.
The students' goal is to form a union - United Graduate Employees - to
give graduate assistants a collective voice that must be recognized in
discussions with the university, said J.J. Butts, an English graduate
student, TA and a member of the UGE working committee.
The students formed a working committee of about 20 graduate students
in mid-January.
"People want to find ways to represent themselves collectively and come
to be able to have discussions with the university about
their conditions," Butts said. "As a union, you are legally able to sit
down and bargain as partners in the arrangement."
UGE, which is affiliated with Service Employees
International Union, hopes to distribute surveys to as many of the university's
3,600 graduate assistants as possible within the next month to
understand the issues important to them and to gauge interest in
unionization, said Menno Welling, a member of the UGE working committee and a
second-year anthropology doctoral student and TA.
The results of the survey will clarify what issuesTA's are concerned
about, but stipends, health care and working conditions are
issues UGE could address, Butts said.
UGE has not yet contacted SU's administration, said Richard Drucker, an
organizer with SEIU who is working with the TA's.
"We're hopeful that we can work cooperatively with the SU
administration in moving this process along as quickly as we can,"
Drucker said.
SEIU represents SU service employees and has 1.5 million members,
Drucker said. It is the largest union in the AFL-CIO.
New York University and its graduate student TA union, the Graduate
Student Organizing Committee, an affiliate of the United Auto
Workers, struck a deal in late January that increases TA compensation and
health benefits.
The deal made NYU the first private university to sign a contract with
unionized graduate students.
At NYU, the United Auto Workers organized teaching assistants by
holding a union election, said Dave Parker, a spokesman for the
National Labor Relations Board. The university contested the election
and the right of the TA's to unionize. At issue was whether the TA's should
be considered employees or simply students, Parker said.
By spring 2001, NYU's appeals had been overruled, and the union won the
election, said Jason Patch, an NYU sociology graduate student, TA and a
member of the bargaining committee that reached last month's agreement.
The group pushed to start bargaining, but the university still refused
to recognize the union, Patch said. The group decided to hold a strike
vote, but the university recognized the union two hours
before the vote, and bargaining began.
"What the Board did in the NYU case was to hold that these graduate
assistants are in fact employees," Parker said. "They have a
relationship with the university that is such that these are actual
employees as opposed to students."
Being recognized as employees by the NLRB gave the TA's the right to
form the union, Parker added.
The NYU decision may or may not apply to SU, Chancellor Kenneth A. Shaw
said.
"Every place is different when it comes to the question of 'are they
students' or 'are they employees,'" Shaw said.
The most important aspect of the NYU contract was money, Patch said.
The contract sets the minimum stipend level for any assistant enrolled
in a doctoral program at $15,000 annually and is retroactive to the
beginning of this academic year, Patch said. Students enrolled in
professional programs will receive a minimum of $10,000 per year. TA's will
receive a $1,000 increase in their stipend each year of the four-year
contract.
"It's pretty much unheard of in any union contract to get such a large
percentage raise," Patch said. "It does make living in New York a heck
of a lot easier."
Additionally, TA's health insurance will be fully paid by the
university starting next year, Patch added.
TA's at other schools are seeking to follow NYU's example.
The NLRB ruled Tuesday that TA's at Columbia University are considered
employees of the university and thus have a right to unionize,
according to a report Wednesday in the Columbia Daily Spectator,
the school's student newspaper.
At Brown University, TA's held a union election in the fall, but their
ballots have been impounded as NYU's were because the school is
challenging the right of the TA's to organize, Patch said.
TA's at SU are employed by annual contracts, and a full-time TA is
expected to work an average of 20 hours per week, said John
Hogan, director of SU's Office of Budget and Planning. The university's
minimum stipend for a full-time TA is $8,320 for this academic year and will
increase to $8,610 for 2002 - 2003, he added.
Some TA's may work more than 20 hours in any given week, said Dr. Stacey
Lane Tice, assistant dean of the graduate school and director of the TA
program. Assistants who help with grading, for example, may work 40 or
50 hours some weeks and have no responsibilities other weeks.
As an anthropology TA, Welling said he works more than 20 hours on
average per week, with most of his time spent on grading.
In addition to their stipends, TA's have their graduate school tuition
paid for by the university.
This year, $15 million will be spent on stipends for graduate
assistants and for fellowships an additional $19 million is allocated
for tuition awards to graduate students, most of which goes to graduate
assistants, including TA's, Hogan said.
The university also pays part of the cost of health care for TA's,
which comes to between $1 million and $2 million annually,
Hogan added.
The level above the minimum $8,320 stipend varies from department to
department and with the number of years a TA has worked at the
university.
For example, TA's in programs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and
Public Affairs make about $10,000 a year, Welling said.
Stipends in most departments are not competitive with departments in
the same fields at other universities, Welling said.
Butts, a fourth-year doctoral student in English, receives about
$11,500 a year as his stipend, he said.
TA's said they can live on the stipend, but they say it is difficult.
"You get by, but you make a lot of sacrifices," Butts said. "You don't
buy things when you don't have to buy things."
Those sacrifices often include dental care, anthropology graduate
student Sarai Conway said, because the TA's are not eligible
to purchase university dental plans.
"Most students, if it's not provided, don't have it," Conway said.
Butts does not have dental coverage because cannot purchase university
dental plans, he said.
"I have not been to the dentist in five years," Butts said. "I would
very much like to go one day."
Patch of NYU got involved with the unionization efforts because he was
concerned about issues affecting him and his fellow graduate students,
he said.
"Like everybody else, I was basically living in poverty," he said.
Many graduate students max out credit cards and work second and third
jobs to pay their rent, Patch said.
Conway, who was a TA her first three semesters at SU and is working on
her master's thesis this semester, has mixed feelings about unionization,
she said.
"Collective bargaining organizations typically aren't well received,
and I'm not sure if it would be helpful or harmful," she said.
"What graduate students want is a higher level of respect, and I
don't know if unionization can bring them that."
The SU administration does recognize that TA stipends should improve,
Shaw said.
Next year's budget includes a 3.5 percent average increase in TA pay,
Shaw said. The university has also allocated an additional $270,000 per
year, starting next year, to supplement TA salaries to recruit and retain
TA's, as determined by market competitiveness, Shaw added.
UGE wants to establish a cooperative relationship with the SU
administration, Welling said.
"We don't want to antagonize the administration," he said. "This is
merely a way of organizing ourselves so our voices can be heard."
If TA's try to form a union, the university's first response would be
to decide if the NYU case applied to SU, Shaw said.
"Each university is different in that sense," he said. "We would just
have to see how that worked out."
After the university's lawyers evaluated the NYU case to see if it
applied to SU, the university would eventually give one of
three possible responses, Shaw said.
It could approve the union, reject the union by arguing it has no legal
right to exist or approve it with a warning that the administration
thinks unionization is a bad idea, Shaw said.
The NLRB's ruling in the NYU case sets important precedent for TA's
seeking to unionize at other institutions, NLRB spokesman
Parker said.
"Each case is fact specific," he said, "but there are general rules of
law that apply to the facts.
"As a general proposition, the board now has held that graduate
assistants are employees," Parker said
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Mon Oct 28 2002 - 02:52:32 EST