From the Chroncicle of Higher Education: Graduate-student unions won three separate battles last week, in California, New York, and Washington, strengthening the movement to organize teaching and research assistants. In the largest victory, the California state labor board verified that the United Automobile Workers union had collected signatures from a majority of the 6,000 teaching assistants, tutors, and graders in the California State University System. State law requires the university to recognize the union if it shows support from more than 50 percent of the bargaining unit. The UAW had another victory last week in Washington State, where the union had been campaigning for several years to represent teaching and research assistants at the University of Washington. In recent years, the union represented some teaching assistants, but the university would not recognize it as the exclusive bargaining agent for the TA's, contending that state law prohibited it...Last week, results of a mail election were announced by the state's Public Employment Relations Commission. Nearly 59 percent of the graduate assistants favored being represented by the union. In a third win for such unions, a regional director for the National Labor Relations Board ruled last week that some graduate students who work for the Research Foundation at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse, may unionize. The Research Foundation is a nonprofit organization that handles external grants and research contracts for SUNY.