Why unions work! the GSOC experience

For GSOC'ers who have joined NYU later than January 2002, here's a comparison of how the contract changed working conditions for grad employees here. As we enter the final year of our first contract and head towards renegotiating a new contract with NYU next year, we hope you get a sense of the magnitude of our victory, what we need to win again, and why it's important for every GSOC'er to get involved.

[To download the entire contract, click here (you will need an Adobe Acrobat Reader).]

If you are an employee on another campus in the process of organizing academic workers and want to know how unions can benefit you, this is for you as well.

And if you don't yet have a union campaign on your campus, we hope this inspires you to take up the fight to establish a union!

Before the GSOC contract

Stipends - No guarantees on minimum pay for graduate assistants. The average stipend was $12,000 a year and some graduate assistants were earning as low as $5000 for the whole year.

No healthcare coverage.

Many graduate assistants had no tuition or fee waivers either.

No procedure in place to address problems and grievances, and no say in our working conditions

Our ground-breaking contract changed all that for graduate students who also work as employees. Here's how:

The GSOC contract

Stipends - At least a 38% increase! Master's candidates win minimum stipend of $10,000 for the first year. PhD students win a minimum stipend of $15000 for the first year. Both Master's and PhD candidates win a 1000 dollar increase each subsequent year of the contract. Those above these minimum guaranteed levels win a 3.5% raise every year of the contract.

Healthcare - From no healthcare to fully covered healthcare.

Other fees - Full coverage of tuition, registration, maintenance of matriculation, other access fees and $100 for each full day of pre-term training.

Overtime compensation for work that exceeds an average of 20 hrs per week for the semester.

A grievance procedure that sets in place a system to protect employees' contractual rights and benefits and to redress problems at the work-place.

Contract agreement reached in Spring 2002, is effective retroactively to Fall 2001.

Maintenance of any benefits not explicitly mentioned in the contract.