The Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions consists of unions representing graduate employees (also known as academic student employees or ASEs) at universities in Canada and the United States. The coalition formed in 1992 and each year it organizes a yearly conference at which representatives from graduate employee unions come together to teach and learn from each other about organizing, negotiating contracts, tactics, and mobilization of members. At each conference the delegates spend part of one of the days on the picket line in solidarity with a group of striking workers in the city hosting the conference. In the period between conferences CGEU provides a forum for graduate employee unions to share information with each other, and maintains a website with information about graduate employee organizing.
The coalition is made up of locals from many different international unions, such as: the American Federation of Teachers, the United Auto Workers, the Communication Workers of America, UNITE HERE, United Electrical Workers, National Education Association, American Association of University Professors, and the Canadian Union of Public Employees, as well as some number of independent unions.
The 16th annual CGEU conference will take place in the summer of 2007 in Amherst, Massachusetts and will be hosted by GEO/UAW.
The newest member of CGEU is Graduate Assistants United -- Southern Illinois University, Carbondale which won recognition on September 13, 2006.
Famous quotes containing the words graduate and/or unions:
“In the United States, it is now possible for a person eighteen years of age, female as well as male, to graduate from high school, college, or university without ever having cared for, or even held, a baby; without ever having comforted or assisted another human being who really needed help. . . . No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations, and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“The newly-formed clothing unions are ready to welcome her; but woman shrinks back from organization, Heaven knows why! It is perhaps because in organization one find the truest freedom, and woman has been a slave too long to know what freedom means.”
—Katharine Pearson Woods (1853–1923)