Published Spring 2006
 
A Report from the NYU Strike
The current strike at New York University is the predictable outcome
of the administration's refusal to renegotiate a union contract
that was due to (and did) expire in August. The 2001-2005 contract
was a historic one, since it marked the first successful unionization
effort by graduate assistants at a private university in U.S. history.
During the period governed by the contract, compensation for teaching
and stipends rose an average of 40%. (In the English Department,
pay for teaching four classes went from $12,000 in 2000 to $19,000
in 2004.) The agreement provided for full health insurance, which
was previously paid for by students themselves. The union contract
secured compensation for required training, and outside arbitration
of grievances. To my knowledge, no professor felt that the unionization
of graduate assistants had negatively affected faculty-student relations
– perhaps for this reason, the results of a poll of directors of
graduate studies on this issue were never released by the administration.
Why, then, does NYU's "University Leadership Team" (to use their
self-appointed moniker) display such rigid opposition to the continuation
of a beneficial arrangement? There are many answers to this, but
a preliminary one is: because they can. If any one event decisively
influenced the administration's course, it was the National Labor
Relations Board's reversal of a precedent set in 2000, when it unanimously
ruled that NYU graduate assistants were employees with the right
to unionize. The reappointed Bush-era Board, in response to a similar
dispute at Brown University, held by a 3-2 majority (split along
partisan lines) in 2004 that graduate assistants were not, after
all, employees. Though this was not a binding decision, and NYU's
administrators were under no compulsion to derecognize its graduate
student union, that is what they did.
The administration tried to produce the impression that they tried
and failed to come to an agreement. Perhaps anticipating that few
students would be present, NYU President John Sexton hosted a "town-hall
meeting" on July 12th, in which he made it clear that he did not
intend to bargain with the Graduate Student Organizing Committee.
In August, the NYU administration issued an ultimatum to the graduate
student union, insisting that they agree to a "final offer" within
forty-eight hours. This offer was rejected, as it omitted an independent
grievance procedure and did not allow time for the union to contact
its members. But it did allow Sexton and his team to claim to have
made an offer and been refused, which was repeated in a series of
emails to the student community. In the wake of union members' October
vote to strike (by approximately 85 to 15 percent), the university
administration sent a typical communiqué, this time from Provost
David McLaughlin, with the subject line "UAW votes to disrupt classes."
Nowhere did it mention even the name of GSOC or its roughly one
thousand graduate student members; nor was any evidence given there
or elsewhere for Sexton's claim that the union had not "kept its
word" and had interfered in academic affairs. Strategically, the
administration seemed to believe that by avoiding all reference
to graduate students, and instead identifying the source of trouble
as "Auto Workers," the strike could be portrayed as the deluded
power grab of a few dissatisfied individuals in league with an extraneous
group. Yet the transparency and ineptitude of the university's rhetoric
had the opposite effect: undergraduates and faculty alike were galvanized
in their support of graduate teachers. Most undergraduates did not
find it difficult to believe that graduate assistants, who teach
or grade over two-thirds of their classes, in return receiving a
paycheck (tax and social security having been withheld), perform
work.
On November 9th, the strike began with a rally outside Bobst Library
in Washington Square, where the office of the President is housed.
The administration's responses are worth recounting. On November
19th, a "New Policy" was announced by the university's deans, stipulating
that graduate assistants' normal teaching load of two stand-alone
courses per semester would be reduced to one (this will primarily
affect language and literature graduate assistants, who teach most
of the stand-alone courses). Supposedly unrelated to the strike,
in practice this policy meant three things: first, it authorized
the university to hire large numbers of new adjunct teachers to
fill the newly vacated positions, in contradiction to its expressed
aim of reducing the amount of contingent labor, without it looking
like these would be replacements for striking workers. Ostensibly
being brought in to fill brand-new positions, the fact that these
adjunct professors might conveniently be asked to substitute for
striking workers is doubtless a coincidental side benefit. Second,
it bolstered the university's paternalist stance: reducing the teaching
load strengthens their claims that graduate teaching is nothing
more than apprenticeship or training (albeit a training program
that performs the majority of undergraduate teaching) and that long-term
shifts towards graduate and adjunct labor can be magically reversed.
And third, most divisively, graduate assistants who choose to take
on the heretofore normal load of two courses next semester can "bank"
the extra course, and collect a free semester of funding in the
fall. Thus, teachers who continue striking this spring semester
are threatened with the loss of their work and pay for the next
three semesters, whereas those who return to work and teach what
until now was the standard two courses will receive a semester of
free money. One is impressed with the perverse shrewdness of this
policy, which was likely concocted with the help of a legal team
employed by the administration to help eradicate the union.
On November 28th, Sexton sent an email to graduate assistants
imposing a one-week deadline to return to work. As a carrot, Sexton
offered those who returned non-union contracts guaranteeing the
continuation of the gains and benefits that, ironically, had been
procured earlier by the union (yearly salary increases, health coverage,
etc.). But the sticks were many. Students who chose not to scab
were faced with the removal of both their "stipends" (pay) and their
spring "teaching eligibility" (jobs) – the disaggregation of the
two things being a rhetorical strategy meant to preserve the bureaucratic
fiction that the stipends do not represent payment for teaching,
despite their disbursement in the form of paychecks. In addition,
firing workers for striking is illegal under federal law, whereas
rescinding the eligibility to teach and, coincidentally, the stipend,
can be held to be academic matters, which are strictly university
terrain. Still, it was unclear whether such a threat could be enforced,
as many departments enacted resolutions not to replace each other's
labor, leaving a very real question as to where hundreds of qualified
replacements would be found. In an early sign of the difficulty
of the threats' imposition, Sexton later delayed the deadline, and
delegated the task of discovering which assistants remained on strike
to individual departments, putting them in the unenviable position
of middle management. The threats, then, seem to have been designed
far more as psychological strike-breaking tactics than as actually
enforceable penalties.
As of mid-January, no assistants have been informed as to whether
they have actually lost their work and pay. However, the point of
the threats and rigid posturing is to produce a sense that the strike
is unwinnable, which is strategically essential for the strike-breaking
effort, and thus the threats continue to be deferred rather than
rescinded or implemented. In the meantime, the administration's
communications have shifted to the announcement of new proposals
for resolution, all of which circumvent the union. Most of these
have emerged from pseudo-independent groups with no GSOC members,
such as the "Graduate Affairs Committee," which suspiciously enough
was granted access to NYU Email Direct, the mass email system through
which the administration communicates. Groups of professors have
also attempted to come up with ways to move forward that forget
the single demand of the strike: that the university bargain in
good faith with the graduate students' democratically selected agent.
As none of these proposals contain any allowance for the enforcement
of a contract, and do not provide the material and legal support
of an actual union, they promise little more than symbolic representation.
A widespread allegation holds that strikers are concentrated in
the humanities. Like many assertions in this debate, it usually
remains unsubstantiated, circulating instead as a dark hint that
the strike is the result of naive idealism (as well as ignoring,
for instance, the sociology department, which is as pro-union as
any). Consequently, Sexton describes graduate assistants in infantilizing
terms, reinforcing the idea that their grievances are a form of
teen rebellion. Furthermore, such infantilizing rhetoric carries
with it the paternalistic notion that the university administration
should be trusted to have its charges' best interests at heart.
Combined with the longstanding association of the humanities with
countercultural protest, the pretense that the strike is a form
of champagne socialism delegitimizes it by rendering it strictly
cultural. As one anti-union philosophy professor put it on a weblog
discussion of the strike, "If graduate students don't want to be
treated like spoiled children, they should stop behaving like spoiled
children."
One of the consistent complaints of deans and administrators concerns
the failure of the strike to respect "collegiality." On its face,
this is true. The picket line, with its disruptive chanting, drumming,
etc., is by its nature often carnivalesque: it suspends not only
the ordinary collegial etiquette, but the very habitus of university
life. The result is an unleashing of frustrations of many kinds,
some of which exceed the initial conflict. This is why the defense
of collegiality has become an important high ground to the administration:
harping on it allows the picket line to be depicted as a form of
immaturity. Paradoxically, immaturity is also seen to be a form
of belatedness: Sexton's euphemistic terminology of an "Enterprise
University" and "University Leadership Team" leaves no room for
collective practices such as strikes and protests, and the supposedly
expired sixties radicalism from which they are thought to stem.
Just as the humanities are linked to anachronistic countercultural
protest, so is the social practice of picketing. On this account,
strikers are both immature and out-of-date.
The true cause of the strike is anything but a nostalgic commitment
to counterculture. Unfortunately for the University Leadership Team's
propaganda efforts, graduate study these days tends to include discussion
of the sociology of graduate education itself, which has become
an important sub-field in literature departments. Doctoral students
thus know all too well that fewer than half of them receive tenure
track jobs within a year of receiving a diploma; that the number
of non-tenured teachers continues to grow at a much faster rate
than that of tenured faculty across the disciplines; that universities
continue to rely on graduate and adjunct labor, while relatively
fewer and fewer tenured professors enjoy the privilege of teaching
only upper-level and graduate courses; that graduate assistants
teach nearly all introductory courses in language and literature;
and that collectivization is the rational response to the exploitation
of a labor pool. These are not cultural differences between bohemian
graduate students and technocratic administrators; they are social
realities. And although these realities are not restricted to the
language and literature programs – not at all – I hardly need to
mention that they have been affected very deeply by this macrocosmic
shift in the structure of university teaching.
Even if the strike ends without a contract, it has afforded an
instructive glimpse into the mindset of high-level university administrators
as well as the other major body with whom decision-making authority
rests, namely the Board of Trustees. Comprised largely of financiers,
corporate lawyers, real estate developers, and the leaders of media
conglomerates, the board has shown very little interest in the sympathetic
appeals of graduate assistants that the university as a whole has
benefited from unionization. Of course, the commonly held conception
of the university as the privileged space outside of the economic
sphere tends to disable the recognition that, in fact, universities
are as subject to economic determination as any other major institution,
and are not necessarily any more amenable to arguments based on
social justice. The indifference of the board to the measurable
benefits of unionized graduate assistants only reconfirms this.
In fact, perhaps one can go so far as to postulate a relation between
the progressive prestige of a university and its hostility to a
collectivized workforce (one can adduce the immensely anti-union
positions of the Ivy League schools). Administrators at NYU are
no doubt under immense pressure from their counterparts at other
private universities to resist precedent-setting unionization, and
along the way absorb all the costs and bad publicity that accrue
to union busting.
The philosophical question here is quite a simple one: are graduate
students workers, and do they thus deserve the right to unionize?
They already are classed as workers at many prestigious universities,
including Berkeley, Rutgers, the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
Umass Amherst, and the SUNY schools. The difference is that these
universities are public; thus, state rather than federal laws govern
their labor practices. Is there any significance to the distinction
between public and private-university graduate assistants? I don't
believe that a distinction can be made. Certainly the argument that
unions erode collegiality and interfere with internal academic affairs
can be seriously weakened by a glance at Rutgers, where graduate
students have been unionized since 1972 without incident. It is
also very difficult to deny that working conditions at NYU have
improved since unionization. This in turn has led to better undergraduate
teaching, attracted better graduate students, and improved the university's
reputation and prestige. In response to the current dispute, though,
many outside academics have written to Sexton expressing their reluctance
to recommend NYU to their students for graduate work. Here the status
of universities as protected spaces for intellectual freedom does
exert pressure, as union-busting tactics damage their standing in
ways that may not apply to other social domains. The current project,
then, is to convince the administration that if we win, they have
too.
Note: I thank Michael Cohen, Michael Palm, Emily Cone-Miller and
Descha Daemgen for conversations about many issues pertaining to
the NYU strike. I also thank the editors of the website 3quarksdaily.com
for allowing me to adapt several pieces that appeared on their site
for this article.
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