When Marwan Shalaby moved to New York from Egypt in 2019 to
start an engineering doctorate at New York University (
NYU), he had $700 in his
bank account. He figured that would be enough to get settled.
اضافة اعلان
But Shalaby had to pay for the deposit on an apartment, a
mattress and winter clothes. After going to the emergency room with a cooking
injury, he began to rack up debt.
As he waited anxiously for his first graduate student stipend
payment, which would add up to $2,500 a month, Shalaby realized those checks
would barely cover the cost of living in his new city. The time and energy he
wanted to devote to studying for classes was instead spent worrying about his
bank account.
“My learning experience wasn’t optimal because my mind was so
preoccupied with how I’d pay for the essentials,” he said.
This week, Shalaby, 28, joined more than a thousand NYU graduate
students striking for higher wages from the university, among other demands,
like better health care and a change in the school’s relationship with the
Police Department.
While on strike, the graduate students are refraining from their
work duties, including assistant teaching and grading papers, leaving the
campus in limbo as the university and union continue bargaining over the terms
of the students’ new contract.
More than seven years ago, NYU’s graduate students became the
first in the country to win voluntary recognition for their union from a
private university. The resulting contract expired in August, and graduate
students, who are represented by the United Automobile Workers, have spent
months locked in heated negotiations over the terms for its renewal.
At the center of the conflict between the union and the
university, one of the country’s most expensive, is the graduate students’
demand for higher wages. The union’s organizing committee initially proposed a
$46 hourly wage — more than double the current hourly wages for graduate students
there, which start at $20.
The organizing committee has since dropped its proposal to $32
per hour. The university has countered with a proposed raise of around 22
percent over six years, amounting to a $1 raise in the contract’s first year.
NYU leaders maintain that the graduate students make more than
their counterparts at other schools. They noted that graduate students at
Harvard, for example, recently settled a contract that granted an hourly wage
of $17.
“This strike need not have happened,” John Beckman, an NYU
spokesman, said in an email. “The university has made generous proposals in
this contract renewal.”
The university’s president responded to the strike by emailing
the parents of its graduate students, who nationwide are an average age of 33, and
describing the strike as “unwarranted, untimely, and regrettable,” sparking a
backlash and a slew of jokes on social media from union organizers. (“If I’m
grounded I still can’t go to work,” Chloe Jones, 26, a doctoral student,
tweeted.)
Graduate student organizers at NYU said the comparison with
Harvard’s contract was inappropriate because of the higher cost of living in
New York. The NYU organizers determined their proposed wage by using the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator, accounting for
the constraint that graduate students can only work 20 hours each week.
And while Columbia and Harvard graduate students went on strike
in recent years to get their first union contracts, NYU’s graduate students are
negotiating a second contract, having settled their first in 2015, and
therefore made more ambitious demands. (Columbia’s strike has paused while
students vote on their contract, which would raise wages for hourly student
workers to $20 within three years.)
“A first contract establishes a baseline for future
negotiations,” said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National
Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the
Professions at Hunter College. “In the second contract, the union is seeking to
broaden and expand their benefits. It’s very common for a second contract to be
more demanding.”
The urgency of the union’s financial demands has been heightened
by the pandemic and the economic crisis, as the academic job market has been
squeezed by hiring freezes.
“They’re trying to bully us to drop our wage proposals lower and
lower,” said Ellis Garey, 28, a union organizer and fourth-year doctoral
candidate in history and Middle Eastern studies at NYU. “We finally now have
thousands of graduate workers on the picket line.”
Many private university leaders have traditionally held that
graduate students’ primary obligation was to their studies, not their labor.
But the striking graduate students at NYU argue that there is no distinction
between their work and academics — and that the university couldn’t function
without their paid
labor.
“When I’m doing my research, that benefits the university,”
Garey said. “I present at conferences, organize workshops within my department,
publish articles, publish translations. All of these are things faculty members
do as part of their compensation.”
Compensation isn’t the sole issue driving a wedge between the
NYU graduate student organizers and the university. The graduate students also
asked that the university refrain from calling the New York City Police
Department except when legally obligated or when a violent crime has been
committed. They don’t want the police called in cases of vandalism, for
example, citing the risk to people of color and other vulnerable students.
The graduate students have also made pandemic-specific demands,
including requesting a $500 payment to teaching assistants for the effort they’ve
put into transitioning to remote teaching.
This week all of the duties for which graduate students are
compensated — planning lessons, emailing students, hosting office hours — have
halted.
Some union organizers have approached the moment as an
opportunity to teach their undergraduates about the broader struggle for
student-worker rights.
Arundhati Velamur, 33, who is getting her doctorate in
education, spent the semester leading a course about the teaching of geometry.
She opened her first class with a discussion of the book “Flatland,” an 1800s
satire about Victorian social hierarchy, which imagines a fictional world
populated by shapes whose power is determined by the number of sides they have;
a hexagon, for example, would be more powerful than a square.
Velamur returned to the text to explain why she was skipping
class for the strike — because in NYU’s “Flatland”-like hierarchy, Velamur
said, she and her peers were fighting for more power.
She told her students in an email that she wouldn’t be able to
teach until an agreement was reached, and smiled when she received their
response: Her undergraduates were spending their class time brainstorming ways
to support the union.
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