Organizing for Change: GSEAC/UAW

Abstract

Here at the University of Washington, academic student employees began the process of unionization for the same reason that other workers—academic and otherwise—seek collective bargaining relationships with their employers: we realized that without collective bargaining, we lacked a meaningful voice in the terms and conditions of our employment. In the spring of 1998, several forums took place where graduate teaching assistants gathered to discuss the relationship of our wages, benefits and working conditions to those of teaching assistants at our peer institutions. What emerged from those conversations was an interdisciplinary group of activists convinced that only with an organization independent from the administration—a union with collective bargaining rights—would we be able to make substantive, lasting changes to the terms and conditions of our work. Since then, we have become GSEAC/UAW, a recognized union of graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants, readers, graders and tutors. We won recognition last December, and are currently in the process of negotiating our first contract with the UW administration.