Tag Archives: NLRB

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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 →

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News Round-Up

Happy Friday! Each week, we come across interesting articles and stories around labor, community, and struggles for equity and justice in our changing world. Here’s a sampling of what we’ve found and liked on the world wide web in recent days:

  • Over at Al Jazeera, Sarah Jaffe writes about the growing cooperative movement in New York City and beyond. (Can worker cooperatives alleviate income inequality?) Roots the present moment in the larger history of cooperative. Lots of exciting work brewing for the future.
  • On Shareable, Nathan Schneider has been writing about how the so-called sharing economy might be disrupted by projects that are actually user-owned. Last month, he wrote a great piece called Owning is the New Sharing about projects that are trying to combine the ease of peer-to-peer sharing platforms with ownership structures that are decentralized and autonomous. This week, he interviewed founders of La’Zooz: The Decentralized, Crypto-Alternative to Uber.
  • At the Washington Post today, Lydia DePillis describes organizing efforts at Politico — which, if successful, would be the first organizing campaign to successfully get off the ground at a major new media company.  (Why Internet journalists don’t organize)
  • Last week, the battle for fair wages and labor standards for fast food workers took on a new dimension, as a group of McDonald’s workers in Virgina filed suit against the company for alleged racial and sexual harassment in its stores. At stake is whether McDonald’s could be held jointly liable for the actions of its franchise operators, per the NLRB decision from this past June. Read more at Gawker.
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NLRB Rules McDonalds Jointly Liable for Franchisees

What’s the relationship between corporations and their franchisees? That’s the question at hand in the latest ruling by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

In a decision first reported by the Associated Press on Tuesday, General Counsel for the NLRB ruled that McDonald’s is jointly responsible for the actions of its franchise restaurants — creating a precedent that could have far-reaching implications for fast-food workers and national labor organizing in general.

According to an article by Steven Greenhouse in Portside:

If upheld, the general counsel’s move would give the fast-food workers and the main labor group backing them, the Service Employees International Union, more leverage in their effort to unionize McDonald’s restaurants and to increase hourly wages. The average fast-food wage is about $8.90 an hour.

Read more at Portside

Photo by Fibonacci Blue via flickr (CC-BY).