Columbia, Yale grad students strike for right to unionize

"We at Columbia and Yale felt very strongly that we wanted to send a message to our respective university presidents, and to President Bush, that graduate teachers still demand the right to unionize on their campuses," said Rachel Sulkes, a spokesperson for the Graduate Employees and Students Organization at Yale.
The strikes come after a National Labor Relations Board ruling in July, in a case brought by the Brown University administration, that Brown graduate students are not University employees and do not have the right to unionize.
GESO at Yale and Graduate Student Employees United at Columbia have urged all graduate students who work as teaching or research assistants not to work this week, and all other graduate students not to attend class in support.