We are Graduate Student Employees United (GSEU-UAW). We are organizing a union to represent teaching, research, and graduate assistants at Columbia University. If you are a Columbia student and you are working for the University, this is your union.

Teaching and research assistants provide essential services here at Columbia. We work in laboratories, deliver crucial research and administrative assistance to faculty, as well as tutor, grade, and teach in numerous capacities. We work as teaching assistants in two thirds of social and natural science courses, and teach more than half of all classes in Columbia's Core Curriculum. We make undergraduate education and faculty achievement possible. Yet, despite our substantial contributions to the University, we as individual student employees have no say in the decisions that directly affect our working lives at Columbia.

Consider some common complaints: stipends are meager given the cost of living in New York City; housing remains expensive; healthcare coverage is still inadequate; affordable childcare is all but nonexistent; workloads vary widely and working conditions are often substandard. And as undergraduate enrollment swells, and the University acts more like a business than an educational institution, the situation is likely to get worse.

Collectively, we have the power to prevent this. How? By forming a union. Nationwide, more than one in five graduate employees belongs to a certified graduate employee union, and membership continues to grow. Although some university employers have tried to delay unionization of graduate employees on the false pretense that it conflicts with the university's educational mission, a string of recent legal decisions support our right to organize. As the New York Times asserted in an editorial, "American graduate programs, the envy of the world, are not so fragile that they cannot coexist with unions, or provide workers the rights they enjoy elsewhere in the economy'"(11/25/00). 

In addition, a study by Tufts University researchers in 1999 found that 9 out of 10 professors from universities with graduate employee unions felt that the presence of the union did not strain academic relationships between advisors and advisees.

Unionization is fundamentally about making universities more democratic. By joining together, we can have a real say in the decisions that shape our lives.