Over 150 rally for graduate student unionization The PROSPECT The hype and family behind Sympoh

By Russell Fan | Associate Prospect Editor

On a bustling Friday night, I was surrounded by an intoxicating energy in Frist Theatre, where Sympoh, Princeton’s only B-Boy/B-Girl (break-boy/ break-girl) crew, was performing.

By Lia Opperman

Over 150 graduate students, undergraduates, and post-graduate fellows rallied together with Princeton Graduate Students United (PGSU) to demand fair wages and more affordable housing from the University. A flyer distributed for the event stated “power and protection for grad workers,” and promoted PGSU’s union card campaign, which makes organizing efforts an official union campaign.

The audience listened to speeches from graduate workers, Rutgers American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT), Teachers and Reachers United (TRU) at Johns Hopkins University, and Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA). Undergraduate student groups including the Princeton College Democrats and the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) also went to the rally to show their support.

“Princeton works because we do,” members of PGSU stated during a speech.

The crowd chanted at one point during the rally, “accept my labor, respect my rights.” They also repeated the chant in Spanish. A number of attendees held signs, including those saying, “more pay, more say,” “I signed my union card,” and “union yes!”

U. AFFAIRS

After the rally, graduate students walked around different buildings on campus to hand out union cards. A member of PGSU collected cards on the first floor of the Frist Campus Center. By the time of publication, over 1,200 cards were filled out.

According to the flyer, the group demands fair and effective grievance procedures, improved international student support, better healthcare and funded childcare, affordable housing through graduation, guaranteed pay raises and contingency funds, and clear and safe work standards. PGSU also hopes that the rally and union cards will help them fight for legal recognition as a labor union so that they can represent graduate student workers and negotiate with the University to form a contract.

Gaby Nair, a graduate student and organizer of the rally, spoke to The Daily Princetonian about her hopes for the future of graduate students at the University.

“Today, we are building momentum to get through the first stage of the unionization process [and] to cut to the next phase,” Nair said. “This phase includes signatures that indicate that grads want to have a union election at Princeton, and so we decided to have this rally to kick off that process.”

This move comes in light of a larger unionization movement among universities, including Columbia University graduate workers’

10-week strike last year and Boston University graduate students’ overwhelming vote to unionize in December. It also comes two months after 48,000 academic employees at the University of California’s (UC) ten campuses walked off their jobs as the nation’s largest education strike, which some have claimed started a “wave” to intensify unionization efforts in universities across the country. Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Brown are the four Ivy League universities to have unionized so far.

Liana Katz, the vice president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, explained that “New Jersey is union strong” and that the group supports Princeton and other universities’ efforts.

“We know that organizing together is a really exciting moment for labor,” she said in her speech. She emphasized the organizing of graduate workers and faculty from the UCs to Temple University and The New School.

“All of our members… stand in solidarity with grad workers at Princeton,” Katz added. “When we organize together, we can win.”

Nancy Tang, an international graduate student who spoke at the rally, expressed a similar sentiment to the crowd.

“As a proud member of the PGSU, I want to ask my fellow international students to join PGSU for our rights and build collective power,“ Tang