The Graduate Student Organization is waiting on interested students to take the next, independent steps toward the process of graduate student unionization.

The Unionization Committee, a GSO ad-hoc committee, released a six-page report earlier in November to GSO. The committee began drafting the report over the summer by first researching the unionization efforts of graduate students at other colleges and universities, including public universities like the University of Illinois, and private universities like New York University.

The report details the long process of a private university unionizing, based off of cases from other universities. The group advised more research, time and discussion go into the issue of unionizing.

As a member of GSO executive board for the past two years and a senate member the year before that, Samuel Leitermann, GSO internal affairs vice president and a masters student studying math education, has seen the move toward unionization firsthand.

“This year we haven’t heard as much about unionization, but I don’t know what that’s particularly about,” Leitermann said.

Leitermann said his hope for next semester is that the GSO committee for researching unionizing is up and running and the students in the organization “feel empowered to go forward.”

He said he thinks students should use the mechanisms that GSO has in place to work on the issue of unionizing, and then go from there. Leitermann added that he’s going to reach out to the student body and see who is interested and said he wants others to have, and engage with, an opinion.

Can Aslan, president of GSO and a doctoral student in bioengineering, said GSO is planning to support the investigation of the pros and cons of the unionization by giving students who are interested in unionization the tools to explore it.

In this case, he means following the unionization committee’s recommendation of forming an autonomous registered student organization that will be funded by GSO.

The next steps in the process of unionization, Aslan said, would be completing research, presenting it to the GSO senate and opening it up for not only discussion within the senate, but within the whole graduate community.

One of the actions Aslan has taken toward addressing student health insurance — a major reason why graduate students began researching the idea of unionizing in the first place — is meeting with the Student Health Insurance Committee weekly or biweekly. The committee was created as a university committee last year.

“One of the main concerns of the GSO is that graduate student employees must remain on (university) employee insurance,” Aslan said. “(The university) knows we’ve had a hard stance on this.”

GSO started the process of researching unionization when students criticized the introduction by university administration of the health insurance changes for graduate and undergraduate students last year.

Students said issues with the new health insurance plans included a lack of notice about the health insurance changes from university administration and the required insurance from international students.

This backlash prompted Rebecca Reed Kantrowitz, senior vice president and dean of student affairs, and Ben Ware, former dean of the Graduate School, to send a letter to GSO.

The letter stated that all graduate assistants would be allowed to remain on the university-sponsored employee health insurance plan until a transition to the student health insurance plan is deemed agreeable by representatives of GSO and the university administration.

“We haven’t received a re-confirmation yet, so we think (current administration) are still considering taking us off (the university employee health insurance plan),” Aslan said.

Aslan has asked, at the request of the GSO senate, “to re-confirm the promise they gave us last semester.” If the university leadership does not re-confirm their promise, Aslan said in an email, “the GSO Senate will most definitely take it as backing away from a promise.”

“We are hopeful that this will not be the case and trust the university leadership will keep their promise,” Aslan said.

Aetna, the health insurance company that Syracuse University works with, needs research about how students have used their health insurance plans in order to understand how to implement the plans for the 2016-17 academic year, Aslan said.

The SHI Committee is looking at different options for student health insurance plans for next year, including a non-blended rate, which means different rates for domestic and international students, he said.

Aslan said the committee will hopefully have estimated premiums by the end of January. Because the new contract with Aetna has to be signed sometime by the end of February and maybe into March, Aslan said the SHI Committee has to make its recommendations and the university has to make decisions regarding the health insurance plans in February.

“There have been no concrete decisions regarding the Student Health Insurance requirement for next year,” Aslan said. “The SHI Committee had been working on implementation for the current year, and only recently (in the past two months) had the chance to really work on next year.”

Both Aslan and former GSO President Patrick Neary said GSO broadly supports the idea of adequate health insurance for students, but the cost has had a big impact on students. Aslan said the GSO wants to make sure the university doesn’t limit the student’s health insurance options too much.

GSO Unionization Exploration Committee Report

Published on November 29, 2015 at 10:02 pm

Contact Katelyn: kmfaubel@syr.edu