Graduate Employees and Students Organization

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**GESO**
Graduate Employees and Students Organization
Founded	1990
Country	United States
Affiliation	UNITE HERE
Website	GESO Website

GESO protest at Yale University, 2005

The Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) is a group of graduate teachers and researchers which is trying to be recognized as a union at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

The group's precursor, T.A. Solidarity, was founded in 1987. T.A. Solidarity members voted to affiliate with other campus unions in the Spring of 1990, seeking union recognition and collective bargaining, and adopting their current nomenclature. GESO is affiliated with UNITE HERE as a constituent member of the Federation of Hospital and University Employees, which also includes food service and maintenance workers, clerical and technical workers, and employees of Yale-New Haven Hospital's dietary unit. GESO members have participated in several strikes and walk-outs over the course of their sixteen-year history. In March, 2003, GESO members joined members of other campus unions in a one week strike, in an attempt to gain recognition as a collective bargaining agent from the Yale University administration.

Since GESO began organizing, the university has increased stipends, provided summer funding, improved health care, and aborted several attempts to force streamlined dissertation production upon doctoral candidates. GESO claims that these changes have occurred due to their advocacy, while the university administration claims that they were due to the competition between well-funded universities in the United States for graduate students. Considering the timing of changes to university funding levels, which has coincided at times with GESO action and at other times with changes at other universities such as Princeton and Harvard, there is evidence to support both claims.

In April 2003, GESO held a voluntary, not legally binding, but highly publicized election under the supervision of the League of Women Voters, in which graduate students voted 694 to 651 against making GESO their collective bargaining agent. GESO has claimed that there was a campaign of union busting and intimidation tactics by science faculty prior to the vote, and, in an e-mail memorandum to the membership, also attributed the result to an unexpectedly high number of science students turning out to vote. However, based on the number of GESO members versus non-members who voted in the election, there is evidence that a number of members did vote against their union in the ballot. There were also 27 write in ballots which stated that they supported the idea of unionization, but did not support GESO as that union.[1]

GESO has since mounted successful campaigns over the rights of international students, pay equity in the humanities, human rights violations in the university's investment policies, and diversity in higher education, while continuing to push for union recognition.

1 Actions
2 Controversy
3 GSA Neutrality
4 Opposition
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Actions

Several hundred graduate students from humanities and social sciences at Yale and Columbia universities went on a teaching strike for five days in April 2005 to demand recognition from their universities less than a year after the National Labor Relations Board denied them of protections under the National Labor Relations Act, reversing an earlier precedent, decided in 2000, that graduate employees at New York University were workers and thus entitled to said protections. University officials have stated that the strike had "minimal impact" on the operations of the school. Jesse Jackson made a brief appearance on behalf of GESO. [2] The university has stated that it will continue its previous policy and will not bargain with GESO. [3]

[edit] Controversy

GESO is a controversial group among graduate students at Yale. [4] [5]

In particular, GESO bases their current claims of support on a count of union membership cards[6], as opposed to a secret ballot election (see also NLRB election procedures). This process, known as card check neutrality, involves potential members being approached individually by recruiters, who present the case for why students should form a union and ask the student to sign a union membership card, while the employer maintains neutrality. [7][8] In the case of GESO, these recruitment sessions normally involve two recruiters addressing one potential recruit, which has led to claims by both opposition groups and individual students that some students (including themselves) have been pressured into signing cards for the union. In 2002, the union claimed to have the support of a majority of the graduate students by card count neutality, but then lost the secret ballot election held in April 2003. [9][10]

There have also been claims of "aggressive recruiting". It is standard GESO practice for recruiters to contact students in their homes or in private labs, and some recruiters will continue to contact students even after they have asked not to be contacted. The intrusion into labs has caused problems in terms of safety and disruption of delicate research. [11]

[edit] GSA Neutrality

The Graduate Student Assembly (GSA), the university's official representative body for graduate students (which has advisory capacities in some matters, voting capacities in others), has decided to remain neutral to the union debate, and has issued a statement of neutrality to that effect.

[edit] Opposition

Groups have been formed in opposition to the union. These include Graduates Against Student Organization GASO, an unorganized collection of students in direct opposition of GESO, and At What Cost, which encourages careful consideration of the consequences of forming a graduate student union. Both groups criticize GESO for their "aggressive recruiting methods." Also, these organzitions argue that a sizable number of graduate students who are counted by GESO as members signed member cards solely to pacify recruiters. Membership in both groups is low, and their activity has been primarily in response to GESO actions, such as the 2003 election.