November 1st, 2017

Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees – AFT
555 New Jersey Ave NW
Washington, DC 20001
GAGEorganizing@gmail.com

President John J. DeGioia
Office of the President
204 Healy Hall
37th & O Streets, NW
Washington, DC 20057-1789

Dear President DeGioia,

During the past year, the Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees (GAGE) has had over a thousand conversations with graduate workers on campus. On the basis of these conversations, the graduate community has concluded that collective bargaining is the only appropriate way to make necessary changes that will keep our graduate programs competitive and ensure a work environment that lives up to

Georgetown’s values as a Catholic and Jesuit university. A majority of graduate workers have shown support for unionization by signing mission statements, authorization cards, and membership cards that designate the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) as our bargaining agent.

With hope and expectation that this institution will do the right thing, we call on Georgetown University to live up to its highest Jesuit values of promoting cura personalis and offering dignified work, specifically by respecting the results of these organizing efforts by its employees, voluntarily recognizing a graduate worker union, and beginning to collectively bargain with us.

We hope, expect, and call upon Georgetown University to reaffirm through meaningful action its Just Employment Policy, adopted in 2005, honoring its own commitment “to respect the rights of employees to vote for or against union representation without intimidation, unjust pressure, undue delay or hindrance”. Georgetown should do this by accepting that a majority of graduate workers have formally selected AFT as our exclusive bargaining agent and promptly begin a good faith bargaining process, respecting our voices and interests as valuable members of this community.

Despite publicly claiming to oppose many of the policies of the Trump administration, several prominent universities (including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Boston College, Penn and University of Chicago) have welcomed Trump’s changes to the makeup of the National Labor Relations Board, using them to stall and thwart graduate worker unionization efforts. We celebrate Georgetown’s resistance to the unjust policies of this administration, and we trust that this institution will not betray its moral courage by using the NLRB changes to harm working members of our community.

We call on Georgetown University to respect its own policy, the demands of justice, Georgetown’s faith tradition, and the graduate workers who contribute so much to this community.

We request a formal response by Wednesday, November 8th, 2017.

Sincerely,
GAGE Organizing Committee