The Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC-UAW) is the Union for graduate  Teaching Assistants (TAs), Research Assistants (RAs), and Graduate Assistants (GAs) at New York University. A majority of graduate employees have supported GSOC-UAW for 16 years now because it is through collective bargaining that we have more power to improve our own lives and to make NYU a better and more accessible university in the process. We work hard and our labor is crucial to NYU’s teaching and research missions that make it a world-class university.

When we first organized GSOC/UAW and negotiated a contract with NYU, we joined tens of thousands of unionized graduate employees at more than 60 public university campuses across the US. We negotiated dramatic improvements to pay, benefits, and other working conditions while raising standards for graduate employees across the US.

In our first contract we won:

• A 38% increase to minimum annual pay rates
• Paid health insurance coverage for graduate employees for the first time
• Protection against discrimination and sexual harassment
• A fair grievance procedure with legally binding, neutral third-party arbitration to resolve unfair treatment

Unfortunately, the NYU administration hid behind the weakening of labor law in the George W. Bush era to refuse to bargain when our first contract expired in 2005.

Since 2005 we have continued to work together to win back collective bargaining at NYU by continuing to show majority support for GSOC-UAW. And in the Fall of 2013 we reached a historic agreement with NYU, where a majority of Graduate Employees would go onto vote and win back our union by a 98.4% YES VOTE.

While we did not resolve our differences about the bargaining rights of Research Assistants, in the hard sciences and engineering, the agreement enabled more than 1,200 graduate employees to bargaining rights and to choose unionization. We continue to organize to win a strong contract, to win collective bargaining rights for Research Assistants in the hard sciences and engineering, to improve our work place, and to Making a Better NYU.