Daniel Firak, SBU RAU Organizer

On January 28, 2026, Research Assistants Union (RAU) at Stony Brook University had their contract ratified in a major victory: a contract mostly without concessions, and a raise of 50% to the base salary over a span of 30 months! This was the result of a long fight that we describe below for our readers.

Research Assistants in the State University of New York System are employed by the SUNY Research Foundation (RF), a private non-profit that manages federal grants. This strange arrangement of privately hired researchers for a state university caused plenty of disruption and miscommunication, leading the bargaining to take over two years to be fully finalized.

The first bargaining session was on January 24, 2024, where a small team of researchers from the organizing team of the RAU, together with representatives and lawyers from the CWA, met with the RF’s bargaining team – a hodge podge of RF lawyers and representatives from both the RF and SBU campus. From the beginning, it was clear that the RAU team would have their work cut out for them: with so many variables in the equation, and with NY State, RF, and SBU all shifting responsibility to each other, holding the RF accountable for their work was the main challenge.

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Editorial

On February 19th, 2026, the Graduate Student Employees Union conducted a public panel with the name “Fascism and Working Class Struggle.” The panel description read as the follows:

“Following Max Horkheimer's insight "Whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism," in his latest book Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano writes ‘Whoever is not willing to talk about anti-capitalism should also keep quiet about anti-fascism.’

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Doğa Öner

In New York State, The Taylor Law (Public Employees' Fair Employment Act) prohibits strikes for all public sector employees. The law also includes other comprehensive measures discouraging collective action and aims at disarming workers from what has proven historically to be the most significant form of direct action by workers and unions. To advance a more effective and radical labor movement, it’s imperative for all public employees in NYS, including SUNY workers, to understand this law, its historical development and applications.

It is unsurprising that strikes are the primary target of anti-worker policies. Strikes are not only powerful weapons for attaining demands for workers in workplaces, they also have the potential to reveal essential workplace structures and relations to workers and the general public. According to the ideological/natural view under capitalism, bosses, entrepreneurs, innovators, and owners of companies are indispensable, those who create and drive the wealth of workplaces and societies. Workers, conversely, are insignificant, dispensable, replaceable; parts of production that do not really matter. For the worker as an individual, this view has a reality; production seems independent, something existing without and against them. However, strikes reverse this situation; they advance a class standpoint from which the productive structure that seemed to work on its own and by virtue of the management is seen to be sustained and reproduced by workers.

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Preston Carter, Business Agent of FGSW-CWA 1104

This article considers the difficulties of winning and enforcing our first contract at Fordham and what the union learned from addressing them.

For members of the Education Division of CWA 1104, Fordham University is unique in its Catholic and Jesuit identity. In the context of higher education labor organizing, particularly interesting are the contradictions and paradoxes of the University’s performative commitment to Catholic Social Teaching in juxtaposition to its union-busting and anti-union practices.

Catholic Social Teaching involves basic commitments regarding the right of working people to engage in mutual aid and form unions, etc. There is not supposed to be anything particularly difficult about accepting this teaching, nor is it considered to position the Catholic church politically.

Nonetheless, while most of the lower and upper administration would not hesitate to speak highly of Fordham’s commitment to social justice, it became clear that the performance demanded by the institution does not include adhering to Catholic Social Teaching when it comes to work as such (which includes The Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers). Instead, Fordham as an institution promoted rather than refrained from union busting to the point of enacting Unfair Labor Practices that violated basic Section 7 Labor Rights.

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Editorial

Trump, MAGA, and the oligarchs behind them have cut taxes for the rich and paid for it with cuts to healthcare and food assistance. They are scheming to undermine the rest of our social safety net, to rig the economy and undermine our elections. ICE agents are in our streets and at our airports.

This era of crisis can be an era of growing working-class solidarity and union expansion, if we rise to the occasion and organize. Marches and rallies are incredibly important, and the PSC has mobilized large numbers of members to turnout. But we know they might not be enough to stop the slide into authoritarianism. That’s why May Day Strong organizers working with unions across the country are planning a strategic escalation: a day of no work, no school, no shopping.

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Editorial

Labor for Palestine was launched in April 2004 by New York City Labor Against the War and Al-Awda NY: The Palestine Right to Return Coalitionto reclaim the legacy of rank-and-file working class solidarity with Palestinein the United States, as reflected in groundbreaking statements by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in 1969, and wildcat strikes against the United Auto Workers (UAW) leadership’s support for Israel in 1973.

LFP endorses the 2005 Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) picket line, which demands an end to occupation and apartheid, full equality for all, and Palestinian refugees’ right to return to the homes and lands from which they were expelled.

This includes support for calls from Palestinian trade unions, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and other trade unionists around the worldto refuse to handle Israeli cargo, and calling on labor bodies to divest from Israel Bondsand cut ties with the Histadrut, Israel’s racist labor federation.

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Doğa Öner

Some of the biggest blows to labor come as attacks in the name of freedom; the decision in Janus v AFSCME (“Janus”) that prevents public unions from collecting dues (including our union), the attacks on closed-shop by the name of “right-to-work,” or the insistence on the uninfringeable management rights on the rule of the shopfloor. Precarious and unsafe gig work, likewise, is presented as realizing freedom, autonomy, and independence.

Mark Reiff, in his In the Name of Liberty, observes that in the face of attacks on workers in the name of freedom, labor has not been able to respond on the same dimension, has retreated from the ideal of freedom, and has focused on concepts like equality, equity, and workplace security. (Reiff 2020, 6) Without denying the importance of the latter, we can argue that the inability of labor to tackle the issue of freedom is to our grave disadvantage. A serious approach to freedom from the perspective of the working-class is an indispensable task to set labor on a more radical path, counter attacks we face, and confront our immediate problems from a different perspective. A working-class conception of freedom is key for the ideological, strategic, and ethical clarity labor requires today.

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Preston Carter, Business Agent of FGSW-CWA 1104

The crisis that gave rise to the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) did not end with COVID. In fact, it didn’t start and was never confined to the pandemic. As Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin, a new co-chair of EWOC NYC Local, puts it, “"COVID was an epic emergency that brought the day-to-day emergencies of work to the surface.” What EWOC names as emergencyis, in fact, the ordinary condition of contemporary work: declining real wages, rising precarity, administrative expansion, and a deepening imbalance of power between workers and institutions. The emergency of EWOC turns out not to be COVID but economic crisis and war on workers.

Nowhere is the emergency clearer than in higher education. The university has long relied on a fiction: that it is a workplace unlike any other. Graduate workers are framed as apprentices or interns, adjuncts as contingent professionals, and undergraduates as majorly students, even when they are performing essential labor that sustains the university. These distinctions do not simply describe reality or aid resolution; they actively obscure it and offer objections. They isolate workers, fragment grievances, and delay the development of collective power.

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Editorial

The following letter was written by an international graduate worker in CWA 1104 and shared anonymously out of concern for their safety amid the escalating assault on immigrants and international workers. It has since been read aloud in multiple public forums: by Mike Ippoliti, President of CWA Local 1104 (who debuted the letter in full in an Emergency Town Hall by District 1), by Preston Carter at a New York City rally for international workers, and again at the public delivery of the Fordham Graduate Student Workers’ sanctuary campus petition. The editorial board wishes to share it with the readers of the New York Graduate Worker.

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Aritra Chatterjee

“Interfering with our country’s foreign policy? Sure as hell are!…

…That’s our job. That’s our privilege. That’s our right. And that’s our duty.” These are the words of Harry Bridges, founding president of the International Longshore Workers’ Union (ILWU) which represents longshore workers on the US West Coast. He had been asked about the ILWU’s support and leadership of work stoppages in the late 1930s. First, San Francisco dockworkers refused to load food onto an Italian ship after fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia. A few years later, ILWU workers would refuse to load scrap metal onto a Japanese ship after Japanese imperialist aggression on China. Skirting the limits of what was legal under their union contracts, they joined thousands of Chinese American community members on the picket lines, facing not just police repression but also employers and federal arbitrators weaponizing labor law against them. They were also met with disapproval from President FDR, often viewed as an ally of labor, for “interfering in the good diplomatic relationships between two nations”. 

In 1940, FDR would be forced to order an embargo on scrap iron exports to Japan. Looking back on these struggles 30 years later, Bridges would say, “Why, that’s what unions are for, to help make foreign policy in the interest of the majority of people in this country and other countries.”

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Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov