The Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) is an unrecognized union of graduate teachers and researchers at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The group's precursor, T.A. Solidarity, was founded in 1987. GESO has participated in several strikes and walk-outs over its history in an attempt to gain recognition as a collective bargaining agent from the Yale University administration. The union is affiliated with UNITE HERE.
External Links
GESO Homepage (http://www.yaleunions.org/geso/)
Labor Relations (http://www.yale.edu/opa/labor/) -- Yale Office of Public Affairs
GESO encourages members who want a better look at how GESO decisions are made, how information is distributed throughout the union, or how organizing relationships are developed, to participate in their department's organizing committee meetings.
The GESO Staff consists of coordinators who meet regularly and are responsible for the everyday operations of the union.
Second, GESO concentrated on the most active areas -- the humanities and social sciences -- and sought to compel Yale to negotiate a written and binding agreement by undertaking a variety of actions, which finally culminated in the grade strike of 1996.
Though GESO invited undergrads to participate, it wouldn't difficult to conclude that undergraduate members would be a distinct minority, and would have little ability to substantively influence the agenda or the union's contract demands.
Admittedly, GESO may have addressed some of these problems in the past couple years, but the widespread perception among undergraduates before was that the graduate students did not have the best interests of the College at heart.
GESO does not enjoy the support of a majority of graduate students (indeed, their last vote on unionization intentionally excluded grad students in the sciences in order to ensure they'd have a majority) or of the faculty.
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