Ruling: Grad students at private universities can unionize

Overturning precedent, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that student assistants at private universities are considered employees with collective bargaining rights, a move that would force Harvard to legally recognize an elected graduate student union.

Tuesday’s decision in a case involving graduate students at Columbia University potentially affects graduate students at hundreds of private colleges and universities throughout the U.S.

Olga Brudastova, a graduate research assistant in civil engineering at Columbia, said she looks forward to “a speedy, fair election” for union representation.

“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.

Columbia announced last month that it would raise the standard nine-month graduate stipend of $26,286 by 17 percent over the next four years. Nine states allow graduate students at public universities to organize, a process that began almost 50 years ago at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. SEIU is running a national campaign, involving some Northwestern instructors and students, to help a range of faculty and other campus workers seek collective bargaining rights with their universities. The ruling means that Harvard and other private universities may have to engage in collective bargaining over pay and benefits for graduate students if a majority of students vote to form a union. The board this week ruled 3-1 in favor of unionization, signaling a victory for Local 33, formerly known as GESO, which has lobbied for graduate student unionization at Yale for decades.

“We revisit the Brown University decision not only because, in our view, the Board erred as to a matter of statutory interpretation, but also because of the nature and consequences of that error”, the NLRB writes in the current ruling. We should embrace the chance to debate this important issue, and we will conduct this campus discussion in a manner that is proper for a university – free from intimidation, restriction, and pressure by anyone to silence any viewpoint.

The landmark NLRB reversal comes on the heels of a slate of wins supported by the UAW, which has led the way in higher education organizing nationwide and now represents more than 35,000 graduate workers at 45 campuses – more than any other US union.

University administrators have said their concern is less about compensation benefits and economic issues and more about workplace issues. The union represents student unions at public institutions and NYU.

Unionizing graduate students isn’t particularly new. Recently, graduate workers at Cornell and the University of Pittsburgh have launched similar efforts to form a union. Earlier that year, adjunct professors launched a fight for K per course, in concert with the broader low-wage Fight for $15 movement.