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AAUP Press release: NYU AAUP Media Release AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS 1012 Fourteenth Street NW Suite 500, Washington DC 20005 ______________________________________________________________________________________ Scholars Speak Out on NYU Grad Students' Rights Leading scholars today released a statement calling on New York University president John Sexton to accept the clear mandate of the Wagner Act, the cornerstone of US labor law, to recognize the right of employees to choose whether and how they wish to be represented in collective bargaining. The statement, prepared by the American Association of University Professors and endorsed by more than a dozen of the nation's most prominent academics in labor law, labor history, and industrial relations, addresses Sexton’s announcement that the NYU administration will not deal with the university’s graduate-student employees through a representative of their own choosing. “The principle at stake is fundamental,” said Roger Bowen, general secretary of the AAUP. “Employers do not have the right to identify, and thereby to control, who shall represent a group of employees,” Bowen added. The statement and its signers follow. (Please note: Institutional affiliations are listed for the purpose of identification only.) The Wagner Act of 1935 embodied a simple principle: employees should have the right to bargain collectively through “representatives of their own choosing.” This countered the decades-long opposition of employers, many of whom expressed their willingness to deal with their employees while abjuring any dealing with “outside organizations.” One of the most notorious of these anti-union plans was promulgated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company in 1915. It made provision for regular management meetings with employee groups, for the execution of a form contract governing wages and working conditions, and for the establishment of a grievance procedure with possible recourse to arbitration—so long as no union was involved. On November 28, 2005, the president of New York University, John Sexton, issued a statement to the university’s graduate assistants announcing a tripartite policy: (1) that the administration was prepared to “work directly with . . . [its] graduate students rather than through the intermediary of a union,” to deal with departmentally elected graduate assistants on “stipend levels, health care benefits, and other matters of importance”; (2) that the administration was prepared to offer written contracts governing pay (“stipends”) and benefits; and (3) that the administration was open to the adoption of a grievance procedure that might include a role for persons outside the university in lieu of the administration as the final arbiter. All this was premised on the administration’s rejection of any dealing with an “intermediary” of the graduate assistants’ own choosing. In content and purpose, the New York University administration’s policy cannot be distinguished from the “Rockefeller Plan” of 1915. We decry the administration’s adoption of an odious anachronism as its policy, but even more the administration’s expressed unwillingness to accept what is universally regarded in the free world as a fundamental right. We, academics in labor law, labor history, and industrial relations, call upon the administration of New York University to accept the plain-spoken principle of the Wagner Act. |
© 2006. ~Created by the WDG~ |
