When the ballots were counted this past Friday, it was clear that graduate employees at Florida State University wanted a union.  By an overwhelming vote of 448-140, FSU grads voted in favor of the United Faculty of Florida being their sole representative for the purposes of collective bargaining.  The new union, the FSU Graduate Assistants United, will represent 2,800 graduate employees.

Key issues during the campaign were concerns about increasing workloads; substandard, inadequate pay; expensive health insurance that employees had to purchase and a lack of input on any of those working conditions.

"We teach a majority of the classes at FSU," said FSU-GAU Co-President Danielle Holbrook. "We are the largest group of employees on campus but we have been working without job security or health insurance. Our workloads have been increasing while our salary remains the same, which means in this economy we're being paid less each year. Without our labor, the university could not function, but we've had no legal voice in how we are treated, so we organized a union and are ready to negotiate with the university." 

The graduate employees in the FSU-GAU will be joining graduate employees represented by United Faculty of Florida (UFF) at the University of Florida, University of South Florida, and Florida A&M and become the19^th graduate employee union affiliated with AFT.  UFF represents the faculty at 12 universities and nine colleges in Florida and is affiliated the Florida Education Association/NEA/AFT.