It’s a battle cry that graduate students have been chanting for years: let us organize!
Today, in a historic 3-1 ruling, the NLRB declared that graduate students at private universities are, in fact, employees — and are therefore eligible to organize, unionize and bargain as such. This ruling marks a reversal of the 2004 Brown University decision, wherein the NLRB ruled that graduate teaching assistants were primarily students, and were therefore ineligible for collective bargaining.
Today, the Board wrote otherwise: “a graduate student may be both a student and an employee; a university may be both the student’s educator and employer.”
This ruling comes as a response to a petition filed by the Graduate Workers of Columbia University and the UAW, and could open the doors for many more teaching and research assistants to organize and demand a seat at the bargaining table in establishing their own working conditions. Until today, NYU’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee as been the only recognized graduate union at a private university in the country; in that case, NYU and GSOC reached an agreement privately, withdrawing a petition that had previously been submitted to the NLRB.
Today’s ruling has broad implications, and its detractors included not just Columbia but every other Ivy League school as well. These schools warned of the potential for faculty authority to be undermined if teaching assistants were given more empowered positions, claiming that collective bargaining by graduate students threatens to challenge academic freedom.
For graduate students at Columbia and beyond, the matter is far more straightforward: these students teach, research and work for wages that are then taxed — which sounds quite a lot like employment. This time around, the NLRB agreed.
With so much at stake, expect challenges to this decision in the coming months.
