UR graduate students go on strike

Graduate students at the University of Rochester are on strike. The much-anticipated move follows months of negotiations with the university on a private election agreement that would allow the Graduate Labor Union to organize.

GLU aims to increase wages and representation for UR’s graduate students, and would be represented by SEIU Local 200United should the students’ efforts be successful. The desire to organize has increased significantly after an April announcement that said 11 international student visas were revoked.

“I think we’re not valued,” says Sam Hunt, a first-year graduate student and GLU organizer. “I think a lot of us aren’t paid what we’re worth in the university. And we don’t have a way to enact change when we are seeing problems.”

Receiving a stipend for their work—rather than a W-2 or 1099, like employees and independent contractors—creates other challenges for Hunt and their peers.

“When the university wants to not treat us as workers like they’re doing right now, they get to say, ‘Hey, you’re not W-2ed,’” they add. “None of us can buy houses, even if we found a way to make a living wage, because the university won’t acknowledge that we are workers.”

In February, the GLU rallied to demand UR president Sarah Manglesdorf sign an agreement to enable a private election. UR decided against the agreement.

“This administration has been extraordinarily condescending to us,” says George Elkind, a third-year graduate worker and GLU organizer. “I fully anticipate that the university’s hope is that they can just keep chipping away at our departments, our funding, our opportunities here, and they’ll cite Trump-era austerity as the why. A union would allow graduate workers to really have a voice in how what I’m sure will be cuts over the next several years take effect.”

On April 17, UR in a statement said it had recently agreed to meet with the state Public Employment Relations Board and the SEIU Union president. 

“Though we are happy to meet with PERB, the University maintains that working directly with our students remains our preference,” the statement reads. “Over the last year, many graduate students have met with University leaders, school leaders, and graduate education staff as well as their assigned faculty advisors and faculty mentors, to reach their educational and career goals. That option continues to be available to all students.”

GLU would rather have a private election than work through the National Labor Relations Board—an agency organizers say has become essentially defunct under the Trump administration. January saw the president fire NLRB member and former chair Gwynne Wilcox and NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, leaving the board with only two out of five active members.

“Typically, seeking to unionize is done by filing a petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency that would conduct a secret ballot election to determine if a majority of graduate students wish to be represented by a union,” the UR statement says. “This is the same process that each of the several groups of unionized employees on our campus used to be recognized. While the University would prefer that the students decide against participating in the strike, there will be no reprisals or retaliation against those who lawfully participate in the strike.”

“The NLRB doesn’t have (a) quorum,” Hunt says. “They don’t have the four members necessary to make their decisions. … Telling us to go to the NLRB is like telling us to use a broken elevator if we’ve injured our ankles. It simply isn’t an option.”

Though UR agreed to meet with PERB and the SEIU president, GLU claims its members were denied the opportunity to meet face-to-face.

A statement posted on the GLU’s social media notes that members learned, upon arrival in Syracuse, that no meeting would take place with graduate workers present. The SEIU president, GLU says, would not have been allowed to meet with UR without signing a confidentiality agreement that would have prevented him from disclosing the meeting’s contents with the group.

“Grads weren’t allowed to be in the room during this negotiation,” says Elkind, who was present at the meeting. “We weren’t even acknowledged as a party under (their) ground rules.”

The graduate students were not refused entry into the meeting, notes Sara Miller, a UR spokesperson.

“It is our understanding and belief that they attended the meeting with the PERB mediator,” she says. “The University was unable, however, to speak directly with the students or the SEIU President, as we understand from the mediator that they refused to agree to basic and customary confidentiality provisions for joint meetings with mediators. The University does wish to work directly with our students whenever possible, however, Friday’s meeting was in a setting and format that were very different than an academic discussion.”

For now, GLU plans to strike—with rallies and pickets appearing across campus—until an agreement is reached.

“We’re always willing to come back to the table and work in good faith,” Elkind says. “As strikes go on, the goal becomes to grow them. … Broader disruption will become the outcome of that should this continue.”

Contingency plans are in place to ensure minimal disruption to our academic mission-including teaching and research activities-during a strike, Miller says.

“In the event of prolonged strike activity, University officials are confident that the academic enterprise will continue as normal without interruption. We do not expect undergraduate students and those not striking to be impacted by the strike,” she adds.

Narm Nathan is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and a member of the Oasis Project’s first cohort. 

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