Harvard cuts a deal over grad students’ union drive

WASHINGTON — Harvard’s teaching and research assistants will vote next month on whether to form the Ivy League’s first formally recognized graduate student employee union.

In a precedent-setting August ruling, the National Labor Relations Board ( NLRB) determined that graduate students at Columbia University were employees with the right to unionize, rebuffing pleas from Columbia and the rest of the Ivy League not to make schools bargain with their students.

On Tuesday, the United Auto Workers (UAW) announced that it had sent the NLRB a petition from the majority of Harvard’s graduate employees seeking unionization. The UAW said it had reached a deal with the university to ensure that an election actually happens, the votes actually get counted, and a union, if it wins, actually gets the chance to negotiate a contract.

That’s not what happened most places the last time the NLRB ruled in favor of private-sector graduate student union rights. The month before the 2000 presidential election, NLRB members appointed by President Bill Clinton determined that graduate students at New York University (NYU) were workers with collective bargaining rights — a ruling that organized labor hoped would spur a wave of successful union drives at private schools. Instead, George W. Bush became president, and in July 2004, his appointees overturned that precedent.

In the four years between those rulings, only NYU’s graduate student workers successfully won union recognition; the university revoked it in 2005. At Cornell University, an election was held, and the union lost. At Tufts University, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown University, graduate student workers voted but the ballots never got counted, because the universities got the NLRB to impound them pending their appeals. — Bloomberg