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Grad Students Are Employees: NLRB’s Historic New Ruling

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.” Continue reading Grad Students Are Employees: NLRB’s Historic New Ruling