How GESO
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Membership
The GESO Membership Handbook 1999
Welcome (or welcome back) to Yale. This handbook is an introduction and guide to the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO). A leader in the national movement for the unionization of graduate students, GESO works to protect, promote, advance, and represent the interests of graduate students throughout Yale.
Why Do Graduate Students Need a Union?
For years graduate student teachers have been trying to secure meaningful representation in the decision-making processes that affect our lives at Yale. Several forms of representation have been proposed and even implemented in the past, including the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, the Executive Committee (an advisory body consisting of graduate school associate deans, faculty, and graduate students), and, most recently, the Graduate Student Assembly. While these representative bodies have at times afforded graduate students the opportunity to articulate our collective interests and concerns to the Yale Administration, none has been consistently able -- or institutionally empowered -- to effect positive changes in graduate student life at Yale. Collective action, on the other hand, has consistently produced significant improvements in the quality of life for Yale graduate students and their families -- most recently free health care for PhD students and subsidized care for their dependents. None of the improvements, though, are guaranteed to remain in place. For that reason GESO has continually sought to secure positive changes in a written and binding agreement with the Administration that would govern such areas of graduate school policy as the teaching fellows program, health care benefits, leave policies, and grievance procedures.
A union contract would be such a written and binding agreement. In working toward such a contract, GESO recognizes that graduate students are not only employees of the University. Rather, the union that GESO members have built seeks to meet the needs of graduate students and teachers, members of an academy in which an increased reliance on graduate teaching can threaten the quality of undergraduate education, and where adverse working conditions can impair our ability to perform well in both our work and our studies.
As a union, finally, GESO is affiliated with Locals 34 and 35 -- the University's clerical, technical, dining hall, and maintenance employees. GESO, Local 34, and Local 35 are autonomous organizations, each with their own decision-making and leadership structures. The three unions on campus work separately to advocate for their respective memberships while sharing organizing techniques, resources, and other kinds of support.
How GESO Works (And Where You Fit In)
In our efforts to secure improvements in graduate student life at Yale, GESO depends entirely upon the collective action of graduate students and teachers. Joining GESO therefore signifies an individual's commitment to participate in discussions and initiatives that pressure the Yale administration to address issues of import to us and, ultimately, to negotiate a written and binding agreement with graduate teachers.
Members' levels of participation vary greatly from semester to semester and from individual to individual. Listed below are the most common ways that members help to plan and execute effective union policies and strategies.
Membership meetings occur once or twice each semester. At membership meetings members discuss pressing issues, elect union officers and coordinators, and vote on resolutions and major strategic initiatives. Membership meetings are also an important opportunity to gauge the union's strength at any given moment. Members' participation in these meetings is crucial to the effective and democratic functioning of the organization.
Between membership meetings, each member of GESO should be involved in a regular conversation with a GESO organizer. The function of the organizer in such a relationship is threefold. First, the organizer should communicate (or represent) the ideas and concerns of the individual member to their department's organizing committee (OC) and to GESO's coordinating committee (CC). Second, organizers provide members with information regarding recent or proposed changes in Graduate School policy, update members on meetings held between GESO representatives and Graduate School administrators, and solicit members' opinions regarding proposals for GESO strategy offered by members from others departments. Finally, organizers are the people who seek to mobilize members for collective action -- petitions, demonstrations, membership meetings, etc. -- at crucial moments during the school year.
Organizing relationships work best when members engage regularly and honestly with their organizer -- offering candid thoughts on graduate school and GESO proposals, responding thoughtfully to plans for action, offering alternate plans, and so forth. Such candor may be difficult at times, but honest discussion -- even disagreement -- is vital to ensure a healthy organizing relationship and a healthy, democratic union.
At times collective action of one sort of another becomes necessary to move the University Administration on particular issues. The nature of these actions varies according to the importance of the issue, the timing of the action, the goals of GESO, and the will of GESO's membership. Proposals for actions such as rallies, marches, leafleting, etc., are voted on by the membership at membership meetings, or between meetings by the members of the GESO Coordinating Committee, who vote in consultation with members and organizers from their respective departments. Recent history has demonstrated that members' attendance at these periodic actions is the most effective means through which GESO members can pressure the Yale Administration to respond thoughtfully and quickly to our issues.
In 1991, members of GESO voted in support of a motion to begin collecting dues from its members. Since then, GESO has collected dues of $45 per academic year from each of its members to pay for expenses such as office space, photocopying, and, at times, staff stipends. (A report of these expenditures is presented at the fall membership meeting.)
In April of 1998, the GESO membership voted to suspend temporarily the collection of dues. Membership dues will be reinstated thirty days after a union election.
For more details about GESO dues, visit our Advanced FAQ.
The greater the number of our members talking to other members about issues of concern, the stronger our union is. For that reason, every member is invited to become a GESO organizer. Becoming an organizer gives a member a much more direct voice in the union's decision-making process. For those members who are not involved in organizing, but who would like to have a more active role in GESO, there are several options:
- Organizing Committee Meetings: Most departments
have organizing committees. They welcome the participation of members
in the department. GESO encourages members who want a better look at
how GESO decisions are made, how information is distributed throughout
the union, or how organizing relationships are developed, to participate
in their department's organizing committee meetings.
- Coordinating Committee Meetings: The GESO Coordinating
Committee (CC) meets weekly to consider organizing opportunities and
difficulties, and to discuss and vote on plans for GESO initiatives.
While only coordinators can vote, CC meetings are open to all members.
Members who wish to put an item on the CC agenda should speak beforehand
with a coordinator from their department.
- Membership Meeting Agenda: Generally, the Coordinating
Committee sets the agenda for membership meetings. Should a member,
however, wish to add an item to that agenda, she/he needs only to draft
a proposal and collect signatures from 50 GESO members to do so. Proposals
for additions to the membership meeting agenda must be submitted at
least one week before the meeting in question.
- Special Membership Meetings: Should an individual member see the need for a special meeting of the GESO membership to discuss a particular problem or opportunity, she/he may do so by drafting a proposal for such a meeting and gathering the signatures of 50 GESO members. Petitions for special membership meetings should be submitted to a coordinator from the member's department.
Questions or Complaints?
Members with questions, concerns, or complaints regarding GESO membership, organizing relationships, actions, dues, OC meetings, and CC meetings should feel free to speak about them with their organizers. Members, however, can also email the chair of the GESO Communications Committee.
GESO is a member-driven organization. Members determine the short and long-term goals of the organization through their participation at membership meetings, actions, and other events. Most important, though, is the ongoing organizing relationship in which members participate. The organizing relationship -- the regular contact between each member and her/his organizer -- is the building-block of the union. It is through these conversations that members express their views and concerns and make their interests known to the other graduate student members of the organization.
The organizer is a member who volunteers to serve as a link between other members in her/his department and the larger body of GESO. In most departments, a weekly organizing committee meeting provides each organizer with the opportunity to express her/his members' views on a given issue or action and hear what other members in the department are thinking. An organizer is typically responsible for communicating with 4 to 6 members in her/his department.
One or more organizers from each department also serve as GESO coordinators. Coordinators attend the bimonthly Coordinating Committee meeting, where they serve as departmental representatives, bringing issues and information from their respective organizing committee meetings. Coordinators represent their members in discussions and vote on GESO plans and strategies. Between membership meetings, the Coordinating Committee serves as the governing body of GESO.
Coordinators volunteer to serve as departmental representatives and also facilitate the day-to-day organizing in their departments. Coordinators must also be endorsed by a vote of the GESO members in their department that should take place before each fall membership meeting.
The GESO Staff consists of coordinators who meet regularly and are responsible for the everyday operations of the union. Staff members are generally also full-time graduate students but may also be non-student employees. Financial compensation for staff members varies and is approved each year by a vote of the membership.
GESO also has officers -- a chair, co-chair, and secretary-treasurer -- who are elected annually at the fall membership meeting. All officers serve on the Coordinating Committee.
In April 1998, the GESO membership voted to create several standing committees to address specific issues of concern to members. All members are encouraged to serve on one or more of these standing committees, which include:
- The International Students Committee, treating
issues of concern to graduate students from outside the
United States. These issues have included funding, pay
equity, English as a Second Language (ESL) training, and
free health care for dependents, among
others.
- The Accessibility Committee, focusing on
issues regarding the recruitment and retention of
graduate students from traditionally underrepresented
groups. The two issues of greatest concern for this
committee in the past year have been the creation of an
office of accessibility and diversity at the Graduate
School and the improvement of childcare and leave
policies for graduate students with
children.
- The Health Care Committee, seeking to improve
graduate student medical coverage.
- The Committee on Teaching, focusing on issues
related to the Teaching Fellows program at Yale.
- The Communications Committee, responsible for
monitoring and improving the spread of information within
GESO. The Communications Committee's primary goal is to
make decision-making processes within the union more
transparent and accessible to members.
- The Outreach Committee, responsible for
fostering relationships between GESO and other groups on
and off campus.
- The Personnel Committee, responsible for hiring and writing job descriptions for GESO staff members.
GESO organizing has gone through three basic phases. First, GESO emerged out of a group of students called TA Solidarity to organize and represent the interests of all graduate students. Second, GESO concentrated on the most active areas -- the humanities and social sciences -- and sought to compel Yale to negotiate a written and binding agreement by undertaking a variety of actions, which finally culminated in the grade strike of 1996. Now, GESO has reached out once again to all graduate teachers and continues to seek negotiations with the University administration toward a written and binding agreement.
Phase One
In the spring of 1987, 25 Yale graduate students and teaching assistants (TAs) decided to form a group called TA Solidarity, in protest against erratic pay schedules and arbitrary working conditions. While biweekly paychecks were instituted the following fall, after the group threatened to file suit against the University, the only other concrete outcome of several years of alternating protests, discussions, and committee meetings was the Kagan-Politt Plan. Released in February of 1990, the plan cut TA positions by 30%, placed restrictions on teaching for students in the fifth year and beyond, and imposed a six-year registration cutoff. In response to the plan, TA Solidarity members voted to form the Graduate Employees and Student Organization (GESO), in affiliation with Locals 34 and 35 at Yale. After repeated failures to engage the Administration in meaningful discussion over the Kagan-Politt changes, graduate students -- along with members of Locals 34 and 35 -- participated in a one-day walkout on December 4, 1991. As a result, the Administration agreed to meet with GESO representatives. When these talks stalled, however, GESO members went on strike for three days in February 1992. While never leading to formal negotiations, the activism of 1991-92 helped bring about changes that the Yale Administration had long resisted, including a pay raise for TAs, an end to the six-year registration rule, and the establishment of Yale's first teacher-training program (Working at Teaching). The 30% cut in the TA budget was never fully restored, however, and section size and TA workloads continued to rise.
Phase Two
In the years following the three-day strike, GESO representatives met repeatedly with individual administrators to discuss the problems of stipends, section sizes, job descriptions, health care, and a grievance procedure. Almost no progress was made in these meetings, prompting graduate students to call for a formal process of negotiations. In the spring of 1994, a majority of graduate students in the humanities and social sciences signed cards calling upon the Administration to hold an election to determine GESO's status. On April 6, 1995, in an election supervised by the League of Women Voters, graduate students voted by a margin of 4 to 1 to endorse GESO as their collective bargaining agent. With this vote, graduate students showed their support for the three basic elements of unionization: collective representation, negotiations, and a written and binding agreement.
In the fall of 1995, with a mandate from graduate students in hand, GESO began an aggressive campaign to get the Yale Administration to sit down and negotiate in good faith with graduate student teachers' elected representatives. This campaign culminated with a majority of graduate teachers in the humanities and social sciences withholding their grades at the end of the fall semester. Yale's response to the grade strike was to threaten and intimidate the striking graduate students. In response, scholars and academic associations from across the country -- including the Modern Languages Association, the American Historical Association, and the Association of American University Professors -- censured Yale for its violation of standards of academic freedom and university conduct. The grade strike ended without Yale agreeing to negotiate a written agreement.
Phase Three
In November 1996, the National Labor Relations Board (the labor-law branch of the federal government) reviewed Yale's reprisals during the grade strike and decided to intervene on behalf of GESO members. The NLRB argued that graduate students who teach at Yale are employees with full protection under U.S. labor law. For the first time in our longstanding attempt to negotiate with Yale, we now have a key ally -- the federal government -- as we work towards a written agreement. While the NLRB's suit over the legality of Yale's reprisals continues to make its way through the court system, GESO members have continued their organizing efforts: working with the administration on issues of concern and working with graduate students to build a consensus around a written and binding agreement that would cover graduate student teaching, health care, and other important Graduate School policies.
In the spring of 1998, moreover, 1,053 graduate students -- a clear majority -- signed a GESO-sponsored petition calling on the Yale administration to negotiate in good faith with graduate students a written and binding agreement governing graduate school policies including, but not limited to the terms of the Teaching Fellows program and health care benefits. President Levin disregarded the petition, mailing back all 1,053 signatures to the GESO Chair. A few months later, however, the administration announced that it would begin providing free health care coverage for all PhD students.
In the spring of 1999, GESO released a report, Casual in Blue, which examined who does the teaching at Yale. Measuring the contacts hours spent with actual students, the report found that graduate teachers and adjuncts perform 70 percent of the teaching of undergraduates while faculty perform 30 percent. Casual in Blue made waves in the national press, radio and television and brought to national attention the trend known as "casualization" of academic labor. James T. Richardson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, stated that "this hard-hitting report should be read by all policy makers in higher education, who should consider the long-range implications of the significant downturn in job opportunities in academe."
Since her installation as Graduate Student Dean in 1998, Susan Hockfield pushed through several improvements in graduate student life, but has disappointed many students in being the first Dean ever to refuse to meet with GESO, despite numerous requests by hundreds of graduate students to discuss issues in various forums. Still, we hope to work with the administration where possible on traditional issues which remain outstanding -- issues like pay equity and the fair application of grad school policies. And above all, we will continue to press for a written and binding agreement that resolves these issues.
What We've Won, What We Hope to Win
The last three years have been one of the most active periods in GESO's history. As a result, the Administration has announced reforms which should dramatically improve graduate students' lives in the coming year. First-year students are entering Yale at a time when our working and living conditions, and the opportunities for further change, are better than at any time in the past five years.
Reforms have been won in the following specific areas:
- Incoming Stipends. Beginning in the 1998-99
academic year, the Graduate School implemented a
long-awaited policy of granting a "full" stipend and
tuition waiver to all incoming PhD students in the
humanities, social sciences and natural sciences. (The
level of the "full" stipend ranges between divisions --
currently $11,000 for the humanities and social sciences,
higher for the natural sciences.)
- Health Care. In a major victory for grad
students, Yale announced in 1998 that it would subsidize
in full the cost of hospitalization for individual PhD
students ($660) and would subsidize by 50% the cost of
dependent coverage (a savings of between $1300 and $2000,
depending on the size of the family). (Masters students,
and all doctoral students outside of the Graduate School,
were unfortunately left out of the loop.) The Yale Health
Plan has substantially upgraded out-of-town health
coverage to include all "urgent care" -- a key provision
for many researching graduate students. (Formerly, only
"life-threatening emergencies" were covered.)
- Career Services. Graduate students have been
excluded from the career services offered to the
undergraduates for many years. Finally, in response to
concerted pressure by graduate students, the University
established an office of Graduate Career Services at the
McDougal Center, with a full-time staff person, so that
graduate students have a better chance at finding the
right job upon leaving Yale.
- Teacher Training. GESO was the original
sponsor of Working at Teaching (WAT), the Graduate
School's first comprehensive training program. WAT has
recently been complemented by a staffed Center for
Teaching and Learning, also housed at the McDougal
Center, and featuring facilities for videotaping
classrooms.
- Better Wages.In 1992, after a one-week job
action, TAs were awarded a 28% pay raise. In 1999,
Dean Hockfield announced a $900 raise over the course of
the academic year for those TAs who teach two sections
per term (upgrading their TF levels from 3.5 to 4.0). TAs
hope that the raise is the first step in rectifying
arbitrary teaching pay inequities that exist across the
Graduate School.
- Fairer Loan Rates for Foreign Nationals. Last
year, after a campaign that included a story in The New
York Times, Yale retroactively lowered the rate of its
internal Student Loan program -- a loan of last resort,
usually (but not exclusively) taken out by foreign
nationals. The rate was dropped from 12% to
9%.
- English as a Second Language (ESL). This
summer, Yale University pledged to fund more programs in
English as a Second Language -- a key victory for
incoming international students, who are often expected
to begin teaching several months upon arriving in New
Haven from abroad.
- Graduate Student Assembly. In response to the 1995-96 grade strike, a committee of faculty and graduate students -- chaired by Political Science professor David Cameron -- proposed the creation of a representative assembly of graduate students who would be able to reach agreements with the graduate school Dean concerning major policy changes. This "stronger" version of the assembly was rejected by the administration, and replaced by the current graduate student assembly, which has the power to "discuss and comment" on major policy changes. This more limited assembly has proved useful in bringing important graduate student issues to the attention of the administration. By working together in the interests of graduate students, the GSA and GESO can achieve substantial improvements in the quality of life of all graduate students.
For more about GESO issues, visit the GESO Issues webpage.
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This page was last updated on: April 5, 2000 |
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Graduate Employees and Students Organization |
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