Spitzer Certifies Columbia Adjunct Union

[One of the less known academic disgraces in North America outside of faculty circles is that higher education is being seriously jeopardized by the corporatization of our colleges and universities. Increasingly tenured full-time positions are being reduced while harassed graduate students to unemployed PH.D.s are being used to 'teach' an increasing percentage of classes -- to the detriment of both students and those struggling to survive on minimal incomes while rushing from college to college trying to keep up with an overload of courses -- with deteriorating quality of teaching as the outcome. The 'CEOs' of higher education in the meantime are making out like bandits with salaries and perks ranging towards $500,000 a year! Needless to say many of our best potential scholars and teachers are peeling away to viable alternative careers. No one without an independent income need apply. The union at Columbia and elsewhere is the obvious outcome of this grossest of injustices. Ed Kent]

From: "GSEU"
To:
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2004 4:22 PM
Subject: [cgeu] NY ATTORNEY GENERAL ELIOT SPITZER CERTIFIES UNION MAJORITY
AT COLUMBIA U.

On December 17, 2004, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer
certified that a majority of graduate teaching and research assistants at Columbia University have signed cards in support of unionization.

Teaching and Research Assistants voted to unionize in 2002 with Graduat Student Employees United (GSEU/UAW-Local 2110). However, two years later their ballots were thrown out after the National Labor Relations Board, currently dominated by Republican appointees, reversed earlier precedents ruling that teaching assistants and research assistants are not employees.

Referring to the NLRB decision Spitzer said, "The decision is wrong. The Labor Board is doing everything - left, right, and center - designed to undercut workers' rights to organize."

In a light moment, after signing off on a document verifying the results of the card count, Spitzer joked, "It wasn't even close. There are no hanging chads. There won't have to be a recount. The overwhelming majority have signed UAW cards." Spitzer added that he will send the results of the card count to Columbia University and urge them to recognize the union.

With the route of an NLRB-conducted election closed off to the teaching and research assistants, the Union is now pressing Columbia to agree to recognize the union based on a union membership card count tha demonstrates majority support for the union and to bargain a contract.

Attorney General Spitzer was joined by Phil Wheeler, Regional Director for the UAW and members of Graduate Student Employees United (GSEU/UAW), the group of teaching and research assistants working to form a union for TAs and RAs at Columbia.

"Tomorrow I will grade 25 term papers from the class I teach and I am going into debt on my salary of $18,000 a year," said Dehlia Harris, a graduate Teaching Assistant in the Philosophy Department. "It is time for Columbia to recognize that we work and bargain with us over fair wages, equal pay for equal work, job descriptions, childcare for working parents, and healthcare benefits."

Wheeler pledged UAW support, "The TAs and RAs will decide their next steps, and our whole International Union will stand by them. We aren't going to sit idle while these workers are denied their rights by this very rich and powerful university."

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