NLRB rules that graduate students are employees
The National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday that graduate students who work as teaching and research assistants at private universities are school employees, clearing the way for them to join or form unions that administrators must recognize.
Debates over the role and rights of graduate students have emerged as more universities rely on lowpaid adjuncts and doctoral students, rather than full-time professors, to teach — a model that has been widely criticized as exploitative. Though adjuncts are making inroads in their fight for higher wages, graduate students have struggled, in part, because the work they do is often a component of their education.
Tuesday’s long-awaited ruling overturns a 2004 Brown University ruling in which the board said grad students engaging in collective bargaining would undermine the nature and purpose of graduate education. Many doctoral programs require students to teach or conduct research before earning their degrees, and as a result, universities argue that they have an educational, not economic,
relationship with those students.
Teaching and research assistants at Columbia University and the New School in New York reignited the fight two years ago by filing separate petitions with the board to join the United Auto Workers. Although a regional board director rejected their bids last fall, the full board picked up the case, inviting students, unions and universities to submit briefs.
Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the entire Ivy League submitted a brief arguing that involving students in the bargaining process would disrupt operations, if they want to negotiate the length of a class, amount or grading, or what’s included in curriculum.
Bringing more people to the table, they said, could lead to lengthy and expensive bargaining to the detriment of all students.
“If a union is allowed to bargain about what teaching and research assistants do, that would in effect be interfering with the educational requirement of many of these schools,” said Joseph Ambash, an attorney with Fisher Phillips in Boston who filed the brief on behalf of the schools and represented Brown in 2004.
Graduate students contend that for all intents and purposes they are employees, and should be afforded the same rights. Though they receive scholarships, stipends and health insurance, many say the coverage is limited and the pay is not enough for them to support themselves or their families. The median pay for a graduate teaching assistant is about $30,800 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but wages widely vary by university and field of study.
There are more than 30 collective bargaining units representing over 65,000 graduate students across the country, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College. Most of those groups are at public universities, which are governed by state laws and not the labor board.