‘A graduate student’s relationship with the University is fundamentally an educational one’
Georgetown University last week declined to recognize a group of graduate students as full university employees, delivering a blow to the efforts of the schoo’s grad students to unionize.
“The university considers its relationship with graduate students educational and not akin to the relationship between an employer and an employee,” The Hoya reported last Friday.
The would-be union of graduate students, who have been protesting for nearly a year to gain recognition by the university, protested on Friday, marching around campus “calling for recognition and fair treatment,” according to The Hoya.
Earlier in the week, Georgetown’s provost Robert Groves informed the students that the school’s Just Employment Policy “did not apply to graduate students.” The graduate students, united under the title of the Graduate Alliance of Graduate Employees, said it will “continue to fight the decision and will draw on support from the American Federation of Teachers, an education-focused union affiliated with the University of Vermont and the University of Chicago that has been designated as the labor advocacy group’s bargaining agent.”
In a Facebook post shortly after Groves’s announcement, the Alliance stated on its Facebook page that “the caliber of prestige, funding, and importance that Georgetown boasts is tied directly with [graduate students’] work and our scholarship.” The post claimed that Georgetown “decided to side with the Trump Administration, reject their Jesuit values, and disregard their Just Employment Policy.”
“Now is the time to stand up for ourselves and fellow graduate workers!” the group declared.
From The Hoya:
The push at Georgetown for better work contracts for graduate students serving as teaching assistants and research assistants started Aug. 23, 2016, when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that student assistants can unionize and collectively bargain…
“We will do everything we can to push for a fair and swift election, and call on our faculty and student allies to support us,” Deidre Nelms, a third-year doctoral student, wrote in an email to The Hoya. “We already have the numbers we need to win an election, and will continue talking to graduate workers, organizing, and moving forward.”
Nelms said she hopes the petition process with NLRB will move swiftly to avoid contention between the graduate students and university faculty.
The seeds of the unionization effort at Georgetown were planted late last summer when the National Labor Relations Board “ruled that student assistants can unionize and collectively bargain,” according to The Hoya.
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