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NY Times, August 24 2016
Graduate Students Clear Hurdle in Effort to Form Union
By NOAM SCHEIBER
Punctuating a string of Obama-era moves to shore up labor rights and
expand protections for workers, the National Labor Relations Board ruled
Tuesday that students who work as teaching and research assistants at
private universities have a federally backed right to unionize.
The case arose from a petition filed by a group of graduate students at
Columbia University, who are seeking to win recognition for a union that
will allow them a say over such issues as the quality of their health
insurance and the timeliness of stipend payments.
Echoing longstanding complaints from blue-collar workers that they have
become replaceable cogs in a globalized economic machine, the effort
reflects a growing view among more highly educated employees in recent
decades that they, too, are at the mercy of faceless organizations and
are not being treated like professionals and aspiring professionals
whose opinions are worthy of respect.
“What we’re fundamentally concerned about isn’t really money,” said Paul
R. Katz, one of the Columbia graduate students involved in the
organizing efforts. “It’s a question of power and democracy in a space
in the academy that’s increasingly corporatized, hierarchical. That’s
what we’re most concerned about.”
Columbia and other universities that weighed in with the board before
the ruling argued that collective bargaining would lead to a more
adversarial relationship between students and the university that would
undermine its educational purpose.
The decision reverses a 2004 ruling by the board involving graduate
student assistants at Brown University. The ruling held that the
assistants could not be considered employees because they “are primarily
students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship
with their university.”
The current board disagreed, arguing that Columbia students could be
deemed employees if they perform and are compensated for work that the
university oversees, even if their relationship was substantially broader.
The three Democratic members of the board made up the majority; the lone
Republican member dissented. A fifth spot on the board has been vacant
since last year.
Highly educated workers in other fields have also chafed at a growing
sense of their own powerlessness. Recent law school graduates have
lamented their rising debt and declining prospects for landing a law
firm job. Many medical interns and residents have unionized in recent
years, while a group of doctors at a medical center in Oregon formed a
union of hospitalists in 2014.
Heather Appel, the communications director for the Committee of Interns
and Residents, which is affiliated with the Service Employees
International Union and represents some 14,000 residents, interns and
fellows nationwide, attributed the activity in part to the doctors’ lost
sense of autonomy and to growing job insecurity amid a trend of hospital
mergers.
At the same time, the Obama administration and its appointees have taken
numerous steps to protect workers and bolster their rights in recent
years, from lifting the minimum wage for workers employed by federal
contractors to new rules that lower workers’ exposure to dangerous
silica dust.
Some of these efforts have touched professionals as well, such as a
requirement that financial advisers who handle workers’ retirement
accounts must act in their best interests, and expansion of the number
of employees who are automatically eligible for time-and-a-half overtime
pay, which affected many postdoctoral researchers.
Many universities opposed the overtime rule, arguing, as with
unionization, that it would change their relationship with their
students and young scholars.
Despite the overall trend, the administration and its appointees have
not been categorically sympathetic to labor. Last year, the labor board
dismissed a petition by football players at Northwestern University who
had argued that they were employees and sought to unionize.
Graduate students at a number of public universities already have the
right to organize under state laws.
Caroline A. Adelman, a spokeswoman for Columbia, said that “Columbia —
along with many of our peer institutions — disagrees with this outcome
because we believe the academic relationship students have with faculty
members and departments as part of their studies is not the same as
between employer and employee.”
Money does not appear to be a central issue between the students and the
Columbia administration, which has already raised stipends by several
percent per year of late.
As a sign of the changing nature of the control that universities exert
over instructors, some of the Columbia students have pointed to the rise
over the past several decades of adjunct faculty members, who typically
teach for less pay, and have far less job security, than tenure-track
faculty members.
Over the past five decades, the proportion of tenured and tenure-track
faculty at postsecondary institutions declined from about three-quarters
to about one-third, according to some estimates.
Beyond concerns that unionization by graduate students will be highly
disruptive, the universities also argued that the reach of the unions
would extend beyond the purely economic aspect of the relationship
between the student assistants and the university. They worry that
unionization might begin to intrude on academic matters, such as class
size and length, even the format of classes and exams.
Joseph Ambash, a lawyer who represented Brown University in its 2004
case and wrote a brief in the current case on behalf of several Ivy
League universities, cited concerns about what he called a slippery slope.
“I don’t think a union is going to negotiate things such as grades,” he
said. “However, when you talk about the term ‘workload,’ that goes to
how many hours a week should a research assistant devote to working in
the lab on research that results in a Ph.D., how many hours they devote
to grading exams, who gets to be selected to be either a teaching
assistant or research assistant.”
All of those examples have significant academic implications and should
be controlled entirely by the university, he said.
In rejecting such arguments, the board cited research that examined the
impact of graduate student unions in public universities and generally
concluded that the unions either had no effect on academic freedom and
the relationship between students and faculty, or actually brought
improvement.
“We don’t observe bad effects on academic freedom, bad effects on
faculty-student relationships,” said Paula B. Voos, an professor at
Rutgers University who was a co-author of one of the studies cited.
Professor Voos’s study, which compared students at four public
universities that had graduate student labor unions with four that did
not, found that on balance students at the unionized universities
reported having better personal relationships and “professional support
relationships” with their main faculty advisers.
The majority at the labor board, an independent agency whose members are
appointed by the president, expressed confidence that universities and
their students could draw a proper line between largely academic issues
and issues of pay and working conditions.
Citing the example of New York University, which voluntarily recognized
its graduate student union in 2013, it said the university’s labor
agreements “incorporate a ‘management and academic rights’ clause, which
would tend to allay fears that collective bargaining will attempt to
dictate academic matters.”
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