The Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) is a group of graduate student teachers and researchers that 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 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 campus unions in a one week strike, in an attempt to gain recognition as a collective bargaining agent from the Yale University administration.
In April 2003, GESO held a voluntary, not legally binding, but highly controversial 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 later attributed the loss to an unexpectedly high number of science students turning out to vote. There is also 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.
In December 2005, GESO finally won a victory in their own elections, after denying the right to vote to any student who opposes unionization, and excluding all TAs from the natural sciences altogether. When asked why all of the TAs from the natural sciences were excluded, GESO publicity contact Rachel Sulkes said that they have "defined themselves as outside our interests".
GESO has since mounted campaigns over pay equity in the humanities and alleged human rights violations in the university's investment policies, while continuing to push for union recognition.
Read more about Graduate Employees And Students Organization: Actions, GSA Neutrality, Opposition
Famous quotes containing the words graduate, employees, students and/or organization:
“1946: I go to graduate school at Tulane in order to get distance from a “possessive” mother. I see a lot of a red-haired girl named Maude-Ellen. My mother asks one day: “Does Maude-Ellen have warts? Every girl I’ve known named Maude-Ellen has had warts.” Right: Maude-Ellen had warts.”
—Bill Bouke (20th century)
“Exporting Church employees to Latin America masks a universal and unconscious fear of a new Church. North and South American authorities, differently motivated but equally fearful, become accomplices in maintaining a clerical and irrelevant Church. Sacralizing employees and property, this Church becomes progressively more blind to the possibilities of sacralizing person and community.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)
“Teaching Black Studies, I find that students are quick to label a black person who has grown up in a predominantly white setting and attended similar schools as “not black enough.” ...Our concept of black experience has been too narrow and constricting.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“Unless a group of workers know their work is under surveillance, that they are being rated as fairly as human beings, with the fallibility that goes with human judgment, can rate them, and that at least an attempt is made to measure their worth to an organization in relative terms, they are likely to sink back on length of service as the sole reason for retention and promotion.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)