As many of you saw on October 1st 2024, NYU Grossman School of Medicine (GSOM) announced an increase in the minimum salary for Grossman Postdoctoral Fellows up to $74,200 and Vilcek Graduate Assistants up to $54,060 (effective December 1 2024), as well as a rollback on student housing rent increases.
We believe that these increases are in direct response to our and other unionization efforts across the city. These increases come after over a year of conversations with hundreds of colleagues at NYU who support collective bargaining, including a majority of researchers across Langone. They also follow a growing citywide movement of fellow researchers who have successfully formed unions in New York City, such as the Rockefeller University Postdoc Union and Weill Cornell Postdocs Union, and negotiated meaningful salary increases that raise standards for all of us as postdoctoral researchers at Mount Sinai did in their first contract.
While it’s encouraging to see NYU recognize the need for improvements and to keep pace with the cost of living in NYC, these wage increases solidify what we’ve known all along – that NYU is paying attention to a national movement of tens of thousands of academic workers seeking to collectively improve working conditions. They are preemptively giving us a small win to distract us from the other issues. However, this battle is about more than wages – it’s about working conditions, the right to be included in decisions that impact us, and most of all, having a democratic voice in our workplace. To this end, it is imperative that we are not tempted to stop organizing in response to these meager offerings – instead, it is time to join the movement of thousands and unionize.
If you haven’t already, please >> sign our letter to President Mills and Robert Grossman << to join the majority of NYU researchers in calling for NYU and NYU Grossman School of Medicine (GSOM) to respect our right to unionize! Every additional signature will make our union’s mandate even stronger, and will provide more collective power in fighting for the issues that matter to us.
Thank you all so much for the support you have already shown for the union and congratulations on this preliminary win!
In Solidarity,
Sarah Leonard, Postdoctoral Fellow, Population Health
Ramin Rahni, Postdoctoral Associate, Biology
Carina Terry, Junior Laboratory Associate, Biology
Ethan Tardio, Graduate Research Assistant, Immunology and Inflammation
B. Colby Hamilton, Chief Communications Officer, McSilver Institute of Poverty Policy and Research
NYU Researchers United – UAW