Labor Board ruling gives grad students right to form unions
Punctuating a string of Obama-era moves to shore up labor rights and expand protections for workers, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday that students who work as teaching and research assistants at private universities have a federally backed right to unionize.
The case arose from a petition filed by a group of graduate students at Columbia University in New York, who are seeking to win recognition for a union that will allow them a say over such issues as the quality of their health insurance and the timeliness of their stipend payments.
Question of power
Echoing longstanding complaints from blue-collar workers that they have become replaceable cogs in a globalized economic machine, the effort reflects a growing view among more highly educated employees that they too are at the mercy of faceless organizations and are not being treated like professionals and aspiring professionals whose opinions are worthy of respect.
“What we’re fundamentally concerned about isn’t really money,” said Paul R. Katz, one of the Columbia graduate students involved in the organizing efforts. “It’s a question of power and democracy in a space in the academy that’s increasingly corporatized, hierarchical. That’s what we’re most concerned about.”
Columbia and other universities that weighed in with the board before the ruling argued that collective bargaining would lead to a more adversarial relationship between students and the university that would undermine its educational purpose.
The decision reverses a 2004 ruling by the board involving graduate student assistants at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
The ruling held the assistants could not be considered employees because they “are primarily students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university.”
The current board disagreed, arguing that Columbia students could be deemed employees if they perform and are compensated for work that the university oversees, even if their relationship was substantially broader.
Arguments rejected
The three Democratic members of the board made up the majority; the lone Republican member dissented. A fifth spot on the board has been vacant since last year.
Columbia also argued that unionization might begin to intrude on academic matters, such as class size and length, even the format of classes and exams.
In rejecting such arguments, the board cited research that examined the impact of graduate student unions in public universities and generally concluded that the unions either had no effect on academic freedom and the relationship between students and faculty, or actually brought improvement.