8th Bargaining Session: Nov 14th, 2024

On Thursday, November 14, GSEU met with SUNY and the State of New York to hold our eighth bargaining session to negotiate a new contract. Once again, SUNY and the state showed an unwillingness to bargain over the basic protections and benefits we’ve proposed. Most of the counter proposals they did provide only gave lip service to the substantive issues we addressed.

Here is what happened at the last session:

New Article: International Student Worker Rights and Protections: The State and SUNY AGAIN showed us their true colors: they simply don’t care about protecting international workers. They shrugged off our insistence that the state needs to use alternative IDs to pay international workers on time before they receive Social Security Numbers. They don’t seem to mind our members missing paychecks to pay for their groceries and rent! They also don’t want to support the international workforce that they actively recruit with tax information and leave for visa processing. Their counter proposal ignored all our language and instead pushed the issue to campus-level committees. But we want contractual protections; not more paper-shuffling committees!

New Article: Employee Offices: The State and SUNY countered with a rejection of our contractual guarantee of employee office space in order to comply with FERPA and ensure student privacy - they instead suggested that employees should simply consult with their departments to secure private accommodations (which we already do!).

Article 26: Lists: The State and SUNY refused our proposal to provide basic contact information in our unit lists, making it more difficult for us to contact and represent workers in our unit.

Article 14: Bulletin Boards: The State and SUNY proposed allowing campuses to decide whether GSEU will have a physical or digital bulletin board; we countered with required digital boards.

Article 23: Personnel Files: The State and SUNY proposed allowing campuses to decide whether personnel files will be stored physically or digitally; we countered with required digital files.

New Article: Housing: The State and SUNY directed us to existing campus housing resources and denied the need for housing benefits in our work contract.

As for our other proposals on Health and Safety, Parking, Discrimination, and Work Reassignment, we have still received no counters! However, if we can show them that TAs and GAs want these important issues addressed, we'll have more leverage to get stronger agreements at the bargaining table.