To: University Administrators at Columbia, Harvard, the New School and Other Prestigious Private Universities

Tell University Administrators to Stop Their Anti-Union Campaign

We, the undersigned, applaud the recent decision by the National Labor Relations Board restoring the right of research and teaching assistants to form unions and engage in collective bargaining and urge university administrators to stop their efforts to get research assistants and teaching assistants to vote against unionization.

Why is this important?

In the 1990s, I helped organize my fellow teaching assistants at the University of California, Berkeley.

At the time, we were facing huge workloads, low pay and insecure health care. It took several years but with support from the UAW we ended up getting university administrators to negotiate with us and created a better workplace as a result.

Flash forward to today and tens of thousands of research assistants (RAs) and teaching assistants (TAs) are still facing the same things we were when I was at Berkeley. Many are paid so little they have to work additional jobs and rely on loans to make ends meet. The good news is they’re organizing and a recent National Labor Relations Board decision restored the rights of research and teaching assistants at private universities to come together in union and negotiate collectively.

But administrators at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and other prestigious private universities are doing everything they can to stop RAs and TAs from organizing. They submitted legal arguments against the right of RAs and TAs to form a union and, when they lost, set up anti-union websites to get RAs and TAs to vote against forming a union.

This anti-union campaign is just another example of the greed we’re seeing at universities across the country. As tuition continues to skyrocket for students, administrators have raised their own salaries dramatically while shifting most of the critical teaching and research work to lower-paid, temporary workers, like TAs, RAs, adjuncts and postdocs.

Sign the petition now to tell administrators at Columbia, Harvard, the New School and other prestigious private universities to stop with their anti-union campaign and allow research and teaching assistants to come together in union to create a better workplace.