Daniel Firak, SBU RAU Organizer

1 May 2026

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

1 May 2026

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

28 November 2025

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

1 May 2026

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

1 May 2026

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

1 May 2026

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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GSEU'S Upcoming Contract Negotiation

Stony Brook Worker Editorial

Preston Carter, Business Agent of FGSW-CWA 1104

1 May 2026

Benjamin Van Dyne, FGSW Coordinating Committee

This fall, after a landslide victory in the election for recognition of our union in April, Fordham Graduate Student Workers (FGSW, now also part of CWA 1104) began bargaining toward a contract with Fordham University. In our first five bargaining sessions, Fordham responded to our comprehensive proposals with stonewalling, willful misunderstanding, deception, and a patronizing attitude. We are going into the spring more determined than ever to build our power and to demonstrate to Fordham that our members should be—and will be—treated with respect.

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Anna Zarra Aldrich, Debjani Chakrabarty, Matthew Dickinson, Matthew Heidtmann, and Amy Kahng

It is no secret that wages for working people have remained stagnant for decades, while the cost of living has precipitously increased. As one of the most vulnerable classes of workers, graduate students at U.S. universities are no exception to this trend. While our employers have fully embraced neoliberal axioms and premises under which they continue to marketize and commodify higher education, many graduate students are unable to sustain themselves. 

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Stony Brook Worker Editorial and Andrew Solar-Greco

SBW: Can you introduce UUP, who you represent, the structure of the union, and how many members you have? 

ASG: We represent the faculty and staff at the main campus, Stony Brook West Campus. We have about 2,400 members, and we represent full-time faculty, part-time faculty, faculty who are not tenured or on the tenure track, and the professional staff in academic departments advising, athletics, et cetera. 

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Mae Saslaw

On Friday November 4, New York University Adjuncts Union, ACT-UAW Local 7902 held a victory rally at Schwartz Plaza on NYU’s West Village campus. The rally was originally planned as a picketing event, but union members had just approved a new tentative agreement hours after the previous contract expired on November 1. The union prevailed in bargaining and won significant improvements to their pay and benefits after authorizing a strike with 95% of voting members in favor. With the raises guaranteed by their new contract, NYU adjuncts are now some of the highest paid unionized contingent instructors in the U.S., according to their press release announcing the tentative agreement. 

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Stony Brook Worker Editorial and Brandworkers Staff Union 

SBW:Can you tell our readers about Brandworkers?

Cody: Brandworkers is a nonprofit worker center that supports food and beverage production workers to build their own unions.

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