The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/grad-student/)
Cornell’s graduate students voted from Nov. 6 to Nov. 8 on whether to unionize under Cornell Graduate Students United. If successful, CGSU will affiliate with the labor union United, Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America.
Five Cornellians were inducted into the Edward Alexander Bouchet Graduate Honor Society, which recognizes outstanding scholarship and promotes diversity and distinction in doctoral education and the professoriate. Among Cornell’s 2019 Bouchet scholars are Elaigwu Ameh grad, Lory Henderson grad, Marysol Luna grad, Aravind Natarajan grad and Monet Roberts grad.
Cornell student Radu Pârvulescu said he was beaten and arrested following his participation in a peaceful protest in Bucharest against corruption in the Romanian government on Aug. 10.
The administration espouses the view that the unionization debate should be a free and open exchange of ideas, but uses its powerful platform to undercut the debate, and grads’ expectations that they can make their decisions free of institutional interference.
To the Editor:
Unions in workplaces are a much-needed apparatus to ensure equitable work conditions. The power of collective bargaining is indisputably beneficial to workers in establishing fair contracts. Our vote in the impending referendum on the matter of unionizing graduate workers is of grave importance, and we bear the burden of vastly influencing the course of graduate education in Cornell and beyond. Follow not in the footsteps of Brexit, widely recognized as the glorious failure of democracy through uninformed, misinformed voters who leveraged their responsibility to vote through passion and nonchalance, bereft of rationality. This letter aims to understand the effect of unionization particularly through CGSU, as an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association and New York State United Teachers.
Rawlings voiced concern that the Cornell Graduate Student Union would change the working relationship between faculty and graduate students by creating an artificial divide between workers and “management.”