Graduate students nationwide press for right to form union
Source: Aljazeera
Ned Resnikoff
Graduate students at some of the United States’ most prestigious universities launched a national day of action on Thursday as part of a years-long campaign to unionize teaching assistants and other student workers.
Students at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago were among those set to demonstrate on their respective campuses throughout the day. Graduate workers at New York University — the only private university where such workers are currently unionized — also planned public events to support the effort and pressure the NYU administration over what they describe as its failure to implement their collective bargaining agreement.
Grievances vary across departments and campuses, but graduate student campaigners said their core concerns included what they described as inadequate benefits and the threat of arbitrary firings.
Olga Brudastova, a graduate student in Columbia’s civil engineering program, said she hopes a union would be able to address issues she has faced with university bureaucracy in the past. During each of the first two semesters of her program, she only received her allotted stipend after a delay of two or three months — a period made especially stressful by the fact that she is an international student with no other source of income, she said.
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