Disclaimer: Student Government Association president Dhruvak Mirani is a former Diamondback opinion columnist.

The University of Maryland’s Student Government Association passed an act Wednesday calling on university administration to recognize the Graduate Labor Union.

The SGA will now send a public letter to the university asking that it formally recognize the union and post the letter on the student government’s social media and website. It also calls for sending a group of SGA legislators alongside GLU representatives to appeal to administrators in person.

The act ultimately passed 27-0-1, but not before it met a series of hiccups during the voting process.

When the act was introduced for voting on the legislative floor Wednesday night, SGA members discovered the two committees tasked with reviewing the resolution didn’t vote on it during their meetings, prompting questions on whether the full body could make a decision.

“I have personally never seen this happen before,” said Speaker of the Legislature Diego Henriquez.

Henriquez then suggested the SGA vote to turn the act into a piece of emergency legislation, which legislators agreed to, so it could pass in time to support the union’s “majority march” set to take place Oct. 1.

But SGA president Dhruvak Mirani said he would have preferred to table the bill and revise SGA’s operational policies to better address the issue instead of suspending the rules on the spot.

[UMD GSG hopes to support international students, fill vacant seats this year]

“I’m quite concerned about the fact that we passed a bill without any of that student input, and that’s not really what the purpose of emergency legislation is for,” Mirani later said while presenting his student body updates to the legislature.

The SGA approved a near-identical act in support of GLU in March, but bills do not always carry over through academic years, said GLU representative Shom Tiwari, who helped draft the latest version.

The library and information science graduate student said the new act highlights the aligned goals of undergraduate and graduate students, reaffirming the importance of having a “broad coalition of support.”

This university reiterated in a statement to The Diamondback Thursday that decisions made by the Student Government Association only reflect student perspectives and have no impact on university policy.

The Graduate Labor Union advocates for the collective bargaining rights of graduate student workers at this university, according to its website. Its members seek to improve teaching, research and employment conditions such as wages and hours.

According to GLU, more than 60 percent of graduate student workers have signed authorization cards in support of the union, a supermajority that would typically yield formal recognition by employers. But Maryland law does not guarantee graduate student workers employed at public universities the right to unionize.

[About 1000 UMD community members rally for graduate student collective bargaining rights]

“This university obviously can’t run without its grad students,” said junior public health science major and SGA member Rumaysa Drissi, who sponsored Wednesday’s act.

A bill that would grant graduate student workers collective bargaining rights has been brought before the Maryland legislature every year since 2017, according to GLU’s website, but this university and the University System of Maryland administration have repeatedly testified against it.

“[It] is frustrating that it has to take so much effort, because ultimately, what the Graduate Labor Union is fighting for is in the best interest of the University of Maryland,” Tiwari said. “We’re fighting for a university that serves the public, and so we’re fighting to make the university better.”

Many public and private universities across the U.S. allow collective bargaining for their graduate assistants, including more than half of the schools in the Big Ten, according to a testimony given to a state legislature committee in January.

Junior computer science major and SGA member Safiyah Fatima said she was happy that the GLU act ultimately passed because many undergraduate students at this university will go on to become graduate students.

“We still represent them,” she said.