Graduate Students Take a Stand

The spirit of the old labor movement seems to be showing some signs of life on university campuses of all places. There have been some rumors that graduate students at Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University are planning a strike. Here's the interesting part: according to the NLRB, graduate students do not have collective bargaining rights. Last summer, the Board overturned the precedent established in New York Univ., 332 NLRB 1205 (2000), and held that graduate students, who spend a good deal of their time teaching classes, grading papers, and performing other duties that used to be left to tenured professors, are not statutory employees under the NLRA. See Brown University, 342 NLRB No. 42 (2004). This ruling stripped graduate students of their right to form unions despite the fact that their relationship to their schools has become less and less academic and increasingly economic. As the dissent in Brown explained (citations omitted):

[The majority's] decision is woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality . . .. The result of the Board’s ruling is harsh. Not only can universities avoid dealing with graduate student unions, they are also free to retaliate against graduate students who act together to address their working conditions . . . .

Today, the academy is also a workplace for many graduate students, and disputes over work-related issues are common. As a result, the policies of the Act—increasing the bargaining power of employees, encouraging collective bargaining, and protecting freedom of association—apply in the university context, too. Not only is the majority mistaken in giving virtually no weight to the common-law employment status of graduate assistants, it also errs in failing to see that the larger aims of federal labor law are served by finding statutory coverage here . . ..

"[A]s financial support for colleges and universities lag behind escalating costs, campus administrators increasingly turn to ill-paid, overworked part- or full-time adjunct lecturers and graduate students to meet instructional needs." By December 2000, 23.3 percent of college instructors were graduate teaching assistants . . ..

The reason for the widespread shift from tenured faculty to graduate teaching assistants and adjunct instructors is simple: cost savings. Graduate student teachers earn a fraction of the earnings of faculty members . . ..

Apparently, the graduate students at Yale, Penn, and Columbia have taken this dissent to heart.