To Cornell Graduate Students United:
Cornell University Administration has set a dangerous precedent for universities across the nation to eliminate labor rights and weaponize deportation and suspension as punishment to suppress rights to free speech and protest for students.
Cornell Graduate Students United needs to prioritize Momodou Taal as the University continues to violate Taal’s rights to due process, free speech, protest, safe and secure housing and movement. Yet, their emails to union members only reiterate CGSU’s condemnation of the University for violating Taal’s rights without bargaining with CGSU, and merely invite union members to attend the Rally for Workplace Justice on Oct. 2, 2024. However, the rally isn’t addressing the severity of Cornell’s unilateral and discriminatory practices as it was announced widely on Sept. 17, six days prior to Taal’s suspension.
The only action CGSU has organized around the possible deportation of Taal is a single Zoom Press Conference. On Sept. 27, with only a five-hour notice, CGSU informed union members of a press conference later that day — the same date Cornell initially threatened to deport Taal. The short, 25-minute press conference only had 30 attendees. The statements CGSU provided were discursive reiterations similar to the emails union members received throughout the week “condemning” Cornell, without any material commitments. Attendees would have been better off with a list of links to compiled CGSU email statements, tweets, and press pieces from The Cornell Daily Sun, Ithaca Times, The Nation, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone.
Any true union with teeth and a material commitment to justice would recognize this patterned behavior as systemic violence, and as union busting, as evidenced at Cornell’s peer institutions including Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California system and Duke University.
The push for union members to attend the rally on Oct. 2 as the sole action in light of Cornell University violating Taal’s, and therefore all graduate student workers’, rights is not enough. We need emergency rallies, town halls, and substantial union check-ins. Graduate student workers have nowhere to express how they feel about recent events on-campus as CGSU continues to operate without any transparency behind closed doors while Cornell continues to create hostile and unsafe work and education environments, especially for international and undocumented students.
Given recent events, we are forced to question: Has Cornell even bargained in good faith with CGSU for the past 11 sessions? When it comes time to ratify a tentative agreement, will graduate student workers feel confident enough to vote ‘yes’ and trust that Cornell will uphold their end of the agreement, or will they cast a vote of no confidence and possibly go on strike? How seriously does Cornell take CGSU given that the University continues to violate the Memorandum of Agreement? Will CGSU stick to the same strategies and tactics as Cornell continues to reject the union’s request to bargain over Taal’s suspension?
Cornell has made a clear message that Taal’s imminent deportation deploys a litmus test to see who is expendable from the community and which rights can they violate with the least amount of “disruption.”
Must we continue with business as usual and wait until Taal’s deportation for actual organizing to happen?
In solidarity,
— Charlie Wang, Graduate Student Worker, Department of History, Cornell University