FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
News From Graduate Employees Organization
Thursday, May 1st 2014
Contact: Aran Ruth (313) 806-0552, commchair@geo3550.org
Jim McAsey, (631) 375-1144, jim.mcasey@geo3550.org
Graduate Employees Organization Joins Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions in May Day Call for Fair and Just Working Conditions in Higher Education Worldwide
ANN ARBOR–We are members of the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions, a body that represents unionized graduate workers throughout the United States and Canada, including grad workers are working to gain collective bargaining rights for those working in higher education who are not yet unionized. We are course instructors; researchers; teaching & research assistants; student affairs, advising, and residence life staffers; tutors, readers, lab supervisors, and graders. We are graduate student-workers. This May Day, members of CGEU stand together to demand collective bargaining rights and fair, socially just contracts for every single graduate worker in North America, and all workers in higher education worldwide. May Day actions, social media, and events will take place across the SUNY system as well as at UWisconsin Madison, UMass Amherst, Rutgers University, University of Michigan, and other schools across the US and Canada on May 1st, 2014.
Whether grad student-workers have a union determines much about our working conditions and salaries, going beyond wages and hours to include whether we are formally protected from workplace and hiring discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in a way that is actually enforceable. Unions give us concrete, tangible power in bureaucratic workplaces whose administrators would otherwise see each of us only as a collection of financial transactions and numbers. Despite rhetoric we often hear about a walled-off “ivory tower,” the forces of economic crisis directly shape the reality of working and studying for faculty, undergraduate students, and graduate workers alike.
As universities have begun to function more like large businesses and state and federal financial support for public higher education has been slashed, graduate workers nationwide have felt the sizes of the classes we teach grow and the funding pools for our assistantships shrink. We have been experiencing similar increased demands on our time and energy to workers in other industries, along with the same stagnating wages. Graduate workers of color, women, international students, and members of the LGBTQI community face institutionalized discrimination and permissive attitude toward harassment, much like workers in other industries. In 2012, a federal bill stripped graduate students of all access to federal subsidized loans and cut the six-month grace period before repayment must begin; this consigns many of us to a lifetime of debt, and an extraordinarily stressful transition out of graduate school.
As graduate employees at the University of Michigan face an environment increasingly hostile to unions under so-called “Right to Work” laws, the University must recognize that our working conditions are students’ learning conditions and that we consider attempts to balance the University’s budget by eroding our wages, health care benefits, and job security unacceptable. We call on incoming President Schlissel to bargain with us in good faith and to recognize that the university works because we do.
The divisions between graduate workers and workers in other industries are fabricated, porous, and finite: graduate education does not last forever, and we enter into a huge range of workplaces and positions after school. Strong, mobilized graduate unions serve as a consistent source of workers in a variety of fields who have had the opportunity to develop union consciousness, who have learned to care about their fellow workers, have experience in democratically-run organizations, and are willing to fight together with others for systemic change. We neither suffer nor succeed in isolation; our struggle is all workers’ struggle, and your struggle is ours.
Comments are closed