Important Update on Grad Healthcare for 2013-14

Hope the summer’s going well. As we’re all getting good work done in the classrooms, libraries, studios, labs, and offices across NYU, we wanted to give an important update on our healthcare campaign and next year’s benefits.

The NYU central administration has once again imposed unilateral changes to our health plan, which will take effect in Fall 2013 and continue the overall erosion of the affordability and quality of RA/TA health benefits since NYU stopped bargaining with GSOC/UAW eight years ago. Most premium costs will increase by 2-3% and the plans will continue the other cuts made to our plan last year.  As long as our benefits are not secured in a Union contract through collective bargaining, the administration can continue raising costs and cutting benefits with impunity into the future. [Click here to read NYU’s initial summary of next year’s benefits that was mailed out recently–NYU says it will be posting this to their website sometime in July, but we wanted to make sure to share it now.]

The good news is that the GSOC/UAW healthcare campaign – including more than 1,000 RAs and TAs signing our petition, personal testimonials,delegations meeting with and building support for our cause from the major Deans and the Associate Vice President for Student Health, etc. – seems to have had some positive effect. NYU student health plans will continue to comply with the benefits mandates of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) – including access to free preventive and contraceptive services – and the cost of insuring a dependent spouse/partner will decrease by nearly 10 percent.

We welcome these improvements and should celebrate the success and impact of our spring healthcare campaign, but dependent premiums continue to be prohibitively expensive, which disproportionately affects women and international students and inhibits NYU’s ability to recruit a pool of diverse, top-notch graduate student workers. In order to re-establish a truly democratic workplace and university, we must keep working to restore NYU’s recognition of our collective bargaining rights.

To get involved with our campaign to win back recognition of GSOC/UAW as our Union, send us an email. Let us know if you would like to meet with one of the participants from the Deans delegations for a more complete debriefing. Lastly, don’t forget to like the GSOC/UAW Facebookpage and follow us on Twitter.