Solidarity With The IGWC-UE!
The Palestine Solidarity Committee supports and stands with the Indiana University Graduate Workers Coalition
The fight for Palestine on a university campus involves many layers of organization. Graduate workers play an integral role in shaping our institution, even if the people who run it refuse to acknowledge it. While the union has demanded that Indiana University recognize the body and bargain in good faith, every level of the administration has refused to do so. Despite this, through the sheer power of mobilization and organization, IGWC-UE has gone on strike twice and secured raises for graduate workers up to 60% in the last 5 years! The IGWC-UE has also showed up for Palestine on numerous occasions, helping to organize after the administrations orders incited a violent attack on protesters in the Liberated Zone.
The struggle for a liberated university includes supporting labor power wherever it is oppressed. The university has demonstrated time and again that it does not care about its students, and is more willing to find money to fuel the military industrial complex than to support some of its most essential workers. For IU to genuinely embody the values it claims to hold, things have to change.
We support the IGWC and encourage all of our supporters to attend their Dec. 6 Rally at the Sample Gates at 12pm!
Below is a letter to the chairman of the Board Of Trustees, requesting that he take the necessary actions.
Dear Chairman Buckner,
The Palestine Solidarity Committee at Indiana University Bloomington writes to you with an urgent request as our university and its graduate students face a period of significant transition and difficulty on campus. Our organization recognizes that many graduate students are not only students, but also workers who provide a great service for our university through their work. The best vehicle for worker representation remains that of a labor union equipped to collectively bargain with the university administration. The Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition (IGWC) has now attempted to meet with members of the upper administration on several occasions to seek representation by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. They have to date received no reply. The IGWC represents a majority of graduate workers and has been a leader on this campus: The IGWC has unified graduate workers, faculty, and students with a vision of IU as a democratic educational institution with shared interests for a fair and equitable workplace.
We are now asking you, as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Indiana University, to meet with IGWC to discuss their following three demands:Â
Terminate Pamela Whitten’s Presidency:
President Whitten has betrayed the research and educational missions of IU. Conducting research, teaching, and learning have all become more difficult at IU, and in some cases, new policies have directly impeded teaching and research work. Mechanisms for democratic governance are sorely needed to reestablish a healthy and functional research, teaching, and learning environment. Nearly every unit on the IU Bloomington Campus, including the full Bloomington Faculty Council, has voted no confidence in Pamela Whitten, along with IGWC on February 4th and the GPSG on March 1st. The events after April 16th have only strengthened this sentiment. President Whitten has refused to take the concerns of faculty, staff, and students seriously. Her disastrous and neglectful leadership has made it impossible for us to have any further working relationship with her administration. President Whitten is the primary barrier to a constructive relationship between this campus and its Board. Graduate workers, as teachers and researchers, are eager to work with the Board to maintain IU’s excellence in teaching and research, but cannot do so without your help. The Board must terminate her presidency to restore the ability to work together with graduate workers to achieve the research and education missions of IU.ÂRevoke UA-10, the repressive Expressive Activity Policy:
IGWC demands you revoke UA-10, which the ACLU alleges is unconstitutional. This policy is contrary to the spirit of free expression that is so central to the research and teaching missions of IU. The selective enforcement of this rule has unfairly targeted speakers on the basis of the content of their speech and not on reasonable time, place, and manner grounds. This failure to enforce the policy neutrally has weakened the credibility of IU as an institution: the administration's unprincipled and radical politicization of this policy is contrary to IU's commitments to truth and fair and free discourse.ÂEstablish a Formal Bargaining Relationship with the IGWC:
The right to form a union and collectively bargain is fundamental. This right is enshrined in the UN Declaration on Human Rights. Graduate workers without union representation are subject to a variety of abuses without redress. Graduate workers earn well below a living wage in a cost-of-living crisis. According to the MIT living wage calculator, graduate workers earn $15,000 below the living wage level for Bloomington, which has the highest cost of living in the State of Indiana. Graduate workers face a changing policy environment with the new law, SEA202, which exposes graduate workers as well as faculty to uncertain punishments for uncertain offenses, but graduate workers have no representative for their rights as workers to advocate for us. The IGWC has been a positive force on campus: successfully securing the first campus-wide raise in a decade, building positive relationships between graduate workers and faculty, and demonstrating a commitment to sustaining IU’s reputation as a competitive place for higher education. A positive bargaining relationship between the Board and the IGWC will ensure IU keeps pace with – and even surpasses – its peer institutions.
IGWC wants to protect the rights of graduate workers, ensure tuition dollars reach classrooms, create robust and democratic institutions of shared governance, and make IU a better place to teach and learn. Therefore we request that you or your representatives meet with the IGWC to discuss their demands. This meeting will be an opportunity to work together to stop IU from falling into further disarray. We assume we are in agreement that much must be done to ensure IU remains a viable place to study, research, teach, and work. This meeting can be a way toward that goal together with IGWC. We ask that you respond to IGWC in a timely manner. IGWC plans to move forward with its own objectives for ensuring the university remains a world-class educational and research institution regardless, but we believe it would be better to provide a chance for IGWC and the board to cooperate first. Please work together and chart a new course for the university we all love so much.Â