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STUDENT NEWS
Office of ILR Student Services staff members take a break from a staff meeting for a photo op. (l-r)
Michelle Zerbel, Kevin Harris, Virginia Freeman, Bryan Nance, Laura Lewis (missing Patsy Sellen).
of associate director for minority education
affairs in OSS in early December. Bryan’s
professional experience, most recently as
assistant director of admissions in CALS, will
be very beneficial as he joins our staff. His
experience and commitment to multicultural
student recruitment at Ithaca College, where
he was the assistant director for multicultural
recruiting, and here at Cornell for the
past two years, will also strengthen our work
in OSS. As you meet Kevin and Bryan, help
us welcome them to ILR.
Registrar Virginia Freeman remains a vital
member of the OSS team. Additionally Patsy
Sellen and Michelle Zirbel keep the staff on
task and offer greetings and assistance to all
who enter the suite.
ONE STUDENT’S PERSPECTIVE
Graduate Unionization Vote:
Effort Improves Grad Lives
by Robert Hickey
Despite the lopsided decision in
the October 2002 election where
graduate students elected not to
unionize, Cornell graduate employees have
seen significant improvements since teaching
and research assistants won the legal
right to organize at private universities three
years ago. Graduate employees attempted
to organize at Cornell before, but the prospects
of unionization changed dramatically
with the New York University ruling, which
acknowledged that teaching assistants are
employees and therefore have the legal right
to organize a union. The news of the ruling
reverberated through the ivory towers
of higher education. Cornell announced
that graduate employees would no longer
have to pay the $900 annual fee for student
health insurance, an issue which graduate
students had lobbied the administration for
several years to address. Following the NYU
ruling, unionization campaigns emerged at
Brown, Columbia, and Cornell, supported by
the professional employees’ department of
the United Automobile Workers (UAW). At
Cornell, we called ourselves the Cornell Association
of Student Employees, CASE/UAW.
In my opinion, graduate employees started
organizing for the following reasons. We
wanted a voice in our working conditions,
the power to make sure the administration
listened to us, and recognition of our teaching
and research contributions to the university.
Anti-union students based their campaign
on predictions of the possible effect
on stipend awards, and were uncomfortable
with the choice of the UAW.
A letter from President Rawlings detailing
the administration’s stance on the issue
implied that a union might disrupt our collegial
environment. In response, dozens of ILR
faculty and staff published an open letter in
the Cornell Daily Sun in support of collective
bargaining rights for graduate employees.
Organizing is a difficult task. Turnover is
extremely high, and our campaign failed to
ground itself in the issues important to graduate
employees. Our campaign also made
strategic mistakes in assessing the level of
support, and proceeding to an election shortly
after the start of a new academic year.
On October 24, 2002, I observed the vote
count of the first ever union certification
election for graduate employees at Cornell
University. It was my job to track the number
of “no” votes on a tally sheet provided by the
National Labor Relations Board. Within the
first few hundred votes, the trend was clear.
1,351 “no” votes were recorded compared to
580 votes for union representation. Despite
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