CGEU Endorses October 7th
The CGEU logo
At the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions’ (CGEU) annual conference on August 8th, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, the CGEU voted to endorse and mobilize for the October 7th national day of action to defend public education. The conference was attended by 30-40 enthusiastic officials, members and staffers of graduate employee unions from the US and Canada. I spoke on a panel about the March 4th day of action with CCNY student Larry Hales and Jorge Cabrera, a California organizer and grad student with UAW 2865/UCal, which was well received. All the CGEU-ers were very supportive of March 4th, recognized the importance of student-worker alliances, and almost immediately began discussing how they could help organize for October 7th.
As I’ve discussed previously, not only are adjuncts and grad students the recipients of poverty-level wages, nonexistent job security and flimsy benefits, but they are at the center of the ongoing effort to privatize public higher education, so the CGEU is a very important organization with a vital contribution to make to this struggle. It’s going to take a major fightback on the part of graduate employees and other contingent workers over the course of the next decade-plus to defend the institution of public higher education and instructors’ salaries, so this coalition is very important. The recent contract victory of the Graduate Employee Union (GEO) of the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, a CGEU member, in which the GEO defeated attempts to rescind tuition waivers for graduate employees and won the expansion of benefits.
The CGEU logo is shown at right. At first I thought it was just a pair of gears, but after seeing it about ten times I realized that the cogs were actually books. The metaphor is nice: grad students are the cogs that make universities run. Although I don’t think it’s supposed to mean this, it can also be read as suggesting that universities are “edu-factories,” as the CUNYTIME collective once put it. (I finally got to use some of those invaluable art history skills in this blog!)
You can sign up for the CGEU listserv here. For some reason the PSC isn’t a member of the CGEU, but it should be. CGEU members have set a good precedent; CUNY Grad Center students should follow their example.
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