By Glenn Billman, deputy news editor

Graduate Employees of Northeastern University (GENU) hosted a panel Tuesday to discuss the effects of unionization on students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics as the group continues to attempt to create a union for graduate-level on-campus employees in conjunction with the United Autoworkers Union (UAW).

The panel members discussed their own experiences and answered student questions about the benefits of collective bargaining, the influence of an outside organization on campus life and student concerns during the two-hour meeting in Dockser Hall.

One of the panelists was Daniel Genest, an environmental science Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where graduate-level employees are unionized with UAW. He said that without the support of the union, he might not have his job after a faculty member tried to have him fired.

“When you are a student employee, all the power is stacked against you. You’re dealing with administration, you’re dealing with tenured faculty,” Genest said. “So for me, when I sort of got targeted with this crazy behavior, I was terrified. Even looking back on it, I thought I was losing my job.”

Graduate students began the process of forging a union between GENU and UAW—which represents thousands of graduate students and other workers across the country—in the summer of 2016 to protect graduate-level student employees and their benefits, including research and teaching assistants.

According to fourth-year personal health informatics Ph.D. candidate and GENU organizer Alex Ahmed, GENU is still in the process of campaigning for unionization by focusing on building leadership and making connections.

“We don’t want to file for an election too early, because that’s a danger,” Ahmed said. “If you file for an election, that is the point where the anti-campaign from the administration begins to really start going. And we know this because our advisors at the UAW who we’re sort of working with, they have seen from their past campaigns that this is what happens. When you file, your level of support among the workers always decreases, it never increases.”

During the question and answer portion of the evening, one audience member brought up the emails graduate students have been receiving from the university warning them not to unionize. One such email from Associate Dean of Graduate Program Administration Bryan Lackaye told students that unionizing could lead to students losing flexibility in their graduate experience, having to pay union fees and being called on to strike.

“Graduate students select Northeastern for many reasons, including access to the university’s world-class faculty scholars and unparalleled research and experiential learning opportunities,” Lackaye said in the March 21 email. “Your own path depends on your individual graduate program, which a union relationship could profoundly change.”

Steven Benson, an associate mathematics professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, said that he received similar emails from his administration before the vote to unionize. Adjunct faculty at Lesley have been represented by the Service Employees International Union since July 2015, and Benson said despite warnings from the administration, collective bargaining led to clarified contracts, more secure jobs and increased pay.

“We got emails trying to talk about, ‘Oh, it’s going to ruin our community,’ and actually the truth was the community had been ruined,” Benson said. “That’s why we were doing it.”

Another concern mentioned at the panel was that UAW was an outside organization that could come into the Northeastern graduate community and change things for the worse. Benson said he disagreed with keeping outsider voices away from academic spaces.

“People from the outside come into academia all the time, and in fact, that’s what makes a place good,” Benson said. “I would worry if I learned that everyone of the upper administration had been employed at Northeastern their entire career—that’s a sure sign of badness, no matter what place you’re in. New voices are always good.”

The meeting was previously scheduled to take place Sept. 5, but the university cancelled the room GENU had reserved for the event. In an Aug. 31 email to GENU organizers provided to The News, Associate Director of the Center for Student Involvement Rebecca Lindley said GENU-UAW was not affiliated with the school and not authorized to meet on school grounds with their current paperwork.

University spokesperson Matthew McDonald confirmed that UAW is not currently affiliated with Northeastern, and was thus not allowed to reserve a space.

“The United Autoworkers Union attempted to reserve campus space under the guise of a student organization, circumventing longstanding university policies regarding the request and use of campus facilities,” McDonald said in a Sept. 13 email to The News. “Those policies are in place to ensure that the university’s many registered student organizations have access to needed event and meeting space. The union, which is unaffiliated with the university, did not follow existing protocols available to external groups to request use of campus facilities.”

Ahmed said GENU-AUW sees this as one of many attempts to shut down on-campus unionization. In addition to cancelling the room reservation, Ahmed said officers with the Northeastern University Police Department (NUPD) instructed Ahmed and other GENU organizers to stop handing out fliers and buttons outside of Snell Library on Aug. 31, as the group had not had their materials approved and were not a registered student organization. The officers told Ahmed someone had called NUPD about the unapproved distribution of materials but declined to say who.

“It’s pretty clear that it was deliberate—that the university saw what we were doing and said, ‘We need to shut these people down,’” Ahmed said. “We’re not a registered organization of students, but we’re an organization of students nonetheless.”

McDonald said this was standard procedure as well, as Northeastern has policies that prohibit the distribution of materials by groups unaffiliated with the university.

“These policies are aimed at protecting the safety and privacy of our students, faculty and staff, and ensuring that members of our campus community are not subjected to unwanted solicitation by external parties,” McDonald said.

However, Ahmed said unionization would increase the safety of students, especially with regard to sexual harassment procedures after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced Obama-era Title IX protections had prioritized the protection of survivors to the detriment of the accused, before they had been convicted of wrongdoing.  

“When the power is removed from the administration, that is a threat, because they can no longer do whatever,” Ahmed said. “There have been documented cases of grievance procedures coming through where university processes fail. That protection in really important, especially now.”