Graduate student employees at the University of Maryland have been working to pass a bill that would allow them to form a union.
Check out www.mtrumd.org/ for more about what’s going on. A recent Baltimore Sun article about the struggle can be found here.

Teaching assistants at Western Michigan University will be voting to officially form their union Wednesday and Thursday, Apr 19-20. GEO members will be heading out to Kalamazoo both days to help out, provide support, and have fun!
Anyone who’s interested should contact the GEO office at 995-0221 or umgeo(at)umich.edu.

Approximately two thirds of the graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) at Western Michigan University have filed for a union representation election with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC). The newly formed union, the Teaching Assistants Union (TAU), filed its representation petition and membership cards with MERC on Monday, February 13, 2006.
Teaching assistants teach hundreds of […]

Picket lines went up around NYU’s campus on Wed, Nov 9. The NYU administration has refused to negotiate a second contract with the union of graduate employees, GSOC, hiding behind a questionable decision of the NLRB. This has forced the union to strike to bring the administration to the bargaining table. Early accounts indicate […]

The graduate employee unions at Yale (GESO) and Columbia (GSEU) have voted overwhelmingly to hold a joint strike the week of April 18-22. The administrations of both universities are refusing to recognize the democratic right of these workers to form a union–in defiance of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the opinions of many leaders […]

On July 16, the National Labor Relations Board issued a 3-2 decision reversing the legal precedent granting graduate student employees the right to form a union and declaring that under federal law, graduate student assistants are not employees. While the ruling does not affect public universities, it directly impacts the established union at NYU […]

By a huge margin

Tax officials at many colleges fear that a rule change proposed by the Internal Revenue Service could cost colleges millions of dollars by making nearly every student employee subject to Social Security taxes.
Read this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education and summary from MFT activist Jon Curtiss
[be sure to read the summary from […]

Andy Stern, president of SEIU - Service Employees International Union, has a new weblog - Fight for the Future
Check it out.

Michigan Daily: Same old story
“The tired old argument that GSIs are not employees should be put to rest.”