NYU Graduate Employees Vote to Unionize

Graduate employees of New York University who participated in an election this week voted overwhelmingly in favor of forming a collective-bargaining unit affiliated with the United Auto Workers, officials of the union’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee said in a news release Wednesday night. The positive vote creates a bargaining unit of 1,247 graduate employees of NYU and its affiliated Polytechnic Institute, the group said.

“This is a huge victory that puts us in a position to negotiate for the things that really matter to us,” Natasha Raheja, a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in anthropology at NYU, said in the news release. “We are determined to reach an agreement on a strong union contract by the end of this academic year.”

The university and the UAW reached a compromise agreement last month to let most of NYU’s graduate-student employees vote on forming a union, thus ending a dispute over the students’ unionization rights that had been pending before the National Labor Relations Board.

Under that compromise, graduate employees eligible to vote included graduate assistants, teaching assistants, and many, but not all, research assistants at NYU. Among those excluded were all research assistants at NYU-Poly and those at NYU in psychology, mathematics, and the hard sciences. The union has said that it considers the question of bargaining rights for those employees to be unresolved, suggesting that it has not abandoned its efforts to organize them.