Private universities will need to recognize graduate
students who conduct research and help teach classes as employees and therefore
accept the unions that they form, the National Labor Relations Board ruled
Tuesday.
In a 3-1 decision, the board ruled that undergraduate and graduate
student assistants and research assistants are statutory employees and are
therefore covered by the National Labor Relations Act. The decision opens the
door for the students and research assistants at private universities to band
together to negotiate issues like pay, benefits, workload, and class size.
The decision came in
response to a petition from graduate students at Columbia University and
reversed a previous decision involving Brown University that found private
universities are not required to recognize graduate student unions.
In the new decision, board members
wrote that the Brown decision not only had an incorrect interpretation of the
act, “but also because of the nature and consequences of that error.” The
decision “deprived an entire category of workers of the protections of the
Act,” the members wrote.
Ahead of the decision,
graduate students had been running union drives and preparing for union elections
at top institutions including Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, and the University
of Chicago. The efforts ramped up after New York University became the first
private university to voluntarily recognize its graduate student union in 2013.
Harvard, Stanford, and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology were among the universities that opposed
the petition before the board, warning that giving graduate students collective
bargaining rights could destroy the mentor-student relationship.
“While we are reviewing the
ruling, Columbia — along with many of our peer institutions
— disagrees with this outcome because we believe the academic relationship
students have with faculty members and departments as part of their studies is
not the same as between employer and employee,” Columbia said in a statement.
“First and foremost, students serving as research or teaching assistants come
to Columbia to gain knowledge and expertise, and we believe there are
legitimate concerns about the impact of involving a non-academic third-party in
this scholarly training.”
Universities have
said that doctoral students were not employees because the research they
conducted led them to their PhDs. Doctoral students often don’t pay tuition and
in part do research and assist professors as part of the deal to get a degree
tuition free.
The universities also argued
that they could face disruptive grievances and years-long disputes over
everything from graduate students having to grade essays, which students’
tuition got waived, and how many credits a student needed to become a teaching
assistant.
In a statement Tuesday,
Harvard said: “We continue to believe that the relationship between students
and the University is primarily about education, and that unionization will
disrupt academic programs and freedoms, mentoring, and research at Harvard.”
The university added: “If a
petition for election is filed at some point by a union seeking to represent
Harvard students, we would urge our students to get the facts, learn about the
issues, understand the impact of unionization, and cast an informed vote. A
labor union representing Harvard students will impact not only current
students, but also faculty, staff, and future students.
The United Automobile Workers
(which, despite its name, represents workers mostly from outside the auto
industry nowadays) helped lead the union drive at institutions like
Harvard. The union represents student unions at public institutions and NYU.
UAW officials said they hoped
universities would not cause any further delay and that union elections could
take place this fall.
Students involved said that
unionizing would allow them to negotiate stable livable stipends instead of
having to rely in part on grants.
Graduate students also said
that they could be both students and employees. When they were doing their own
research, they were students. But when they were teaching classes, they were
employees.
Aaron Nisenson, senior counsel
at the American Association of University Professors, said it will be
interesting to see which issues any new unions prioritize. Some graduate
students, he said, have said it is difficult to get the funding they need to
teach a class, while others might want to establish rules regarding taking
outside employment.
“What are the issues that they
raise when they have the opportunity to do so collectively?” said Nisenson,
whose organization supported the board decision.
Nisenson noted that, just as
the Columbia decision reversed the Brown decision, a future decision from the
board could change the landscape once again. That would of course depend on the
views of the board members, who are appointed by the president.
Avery Davis, who is getting
her PhD in human genetics at Harvard, said the decision amounted to “an
affirmation of what we’ve known. … In addition to being grad students, we also
do really valuable work for the university.”
She said that students who
support forming a union will be reaching out to students just starting graduate
school as the fall term starts and working on planning an election.
As for the university
administration, she said, “We really hope that they all agree to be neutral in
this and let graduate workers make their own decision.”
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