Yale, Columbia Students To Strike

Graduate students at Yale and Columbia voted late Wednesday to begin strike action on Monday, withholding all teaching and grading responsibilities for five consecutive days.

At Yale, 82 percent of graduate teaching assistants and 91 percent of non-teaching graduate students in the university’s Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO)—which has been trying to unionize for years—voted in favor of strike action, according to GESO Chair Mary Reynolds.

Reynolds said that the organization’s membership, which includes over 1,000 graduate students in the social sciences and humanities, will strike unless Yale University President Richard C. Levin grants them a contract before Monday.

Levin has repeatedly stated that Yale would uphold the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) current policy on graduate student unionization, which states that teaching assistants at private universities are not employees according to the definition in the National Labor Relations Act.

In a 3-2 decision last July, the NLRB ruled against unionization attempts at Brown University and stated that extending collective action agreements to teaching assistants would “intrude upon the academic relationship between the university and students.”

The decision reversed a 2000 ruling that had allowed New York University graduate students to unionize. NYU remains the only private university in the country with unionized teaching assistants.

Reynolds said that affordable health benefits and child care and standardized pay scales are at stake in GESO’s quest for unionization.

“We want to highlight the issues that face graduate teachers,” Reynolds said. “You have teachers teaching alongside each other who are not receiving the same benefits.”

Reynolds also said that the GESO wants a contract that spells out a “real grievance procedure” and an end to pay cuts.

“For the first time in the history of the Ivy League, grad students and researchers at two campuses are standing up together to demand contracts, more benefits, and better stipends,” said Erik Goldner, a member of the Graduate Student Employees United (GSEU), the group at Columbia trying to gain union recognition from the university.

Goldner said that over 80 percent of GSEU members who cast ballots voted in favor of strike action at Columbia. Goldner would not reveal how many of GSEU’s more than 1,000 members voted Wednesday.

At Yale, Reynolds said that about 500 people attended Wednesday’s meeting, though GESO also would not release exact figures for the vote. Only graduate students in the humanities and social sciences were allowed to vote in the secret ballot.

Graduate students in the natural sciences are not expected to participate in the strike. According to Reynolds, these students are often involved in research and are “not ready to demand recognition.”

“The structure of work is very different for the teachers than it is for the researchers,” Reynolds said. “Relationships with the faculty are often very different.”

Yale’s Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Jon Butler said the university hopes to minimize the impact of the strike.

“We plan to handle this in a low-key, common-sensical fashion,” Butler said. “The vast majority of our classes and sections...will be taught.”

The Yale Daily News reported yesterday that some professors may lead sections themselves or hold sections off-campus to avoid crossing picket lines.

“This is a strike in the non-traditional sense,” Butler said. “All the [teaching assistants] will still receive their usual stipends, even if they are not working.”

—Staff writer May Habib can be reached at habib@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Daniel J. T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard.edu.