Mount Sinai’s Icahn Graduate School of Medicine Student Workers Form Union

In the latest addition to the wave of organizing sweeping NYC and universities across the US, a majority of 300 student workers at Mount Sinai’s Icahn Graduate School of Medicine have signed up to form their union, Sinai Student Workers-UAW. They join tens of thousands of academic workers who have organized with the UAW in recent years, including 550 postdoctoral researchers (“postdocs”) who are fighting for a fair first contract at Mount Sinai after winning their union last summer. The student workers went public last week on twitter and will seek a fair process to establish their union in the near future. They hope to add to the momentum postdocs have started at Sinai and to the massive wave of academic worker organizing in NYC.

“Student workers make essential contributions to the world-class research conducted at Mount Sinai, but many of us still struggle to pay high housing and other costs in New York City, lack secure rights in the workplace, and face increasing uncertainty about our futures given the precarious nature of science funding and unstable regulation of visas and work authorization in recent years,” says the SSW-UAW organizing committee on their new website. By building on the success of student workers and postdocs at NYU, Columbia and The New School, they said, “we can continue to raise standards for researcher working conditions across the city.”

Check out their new website at sinaistudentworkers.org!