A New Era for Grad-Student Organizing

The air around graduate-student activism feels different this time.

In a general sense, Tuesday’s sweeping decision by the National Labor Relations Board sets the clock back to 2000. That year, the labor board had also declared that graduate assistants at private colleges were employees with the right to unionize. Four years later, a George W. Bush-era board reversed that right.

The academic ground, however, has shifted since that 2000 ruling, by a board largely appointed by President Bill Clinton. Universities have become more corporatized, activists and labor observers say, and doctoral students increasingly see their teaching as work. Diminishing academic job prospects mean many graduate students don’t want to, or won’t be able to, become professors, which makes the argument that teaching is part of their training less compelling.

The changing realities of the modern research university and the broad scope of Tuesday’s ruling feed what has been a growing appetite among graduate students to fight for better working conditions at both private and public colleges, where dozens of graduate unions exist under state laws.

Colleges have opposed the ruling on the ground that it would harm mentor-mentee relationships, among other reasons, but it remains to be seen whether they will challenge the right of graduate assistants to form unions like they did the last time, or accept the new legal landscape and turn their attention to winning union elections instead.

“At some point, the tide turns,” says Julie Kushner, a United Auto Workers director who helped organize the New York University graduate assistants whose petition led to the 2000 ruling. “It happened at NYU, which made a decision that it was no longer in their interest to continue to fight the union.”

She was referring to the fact that the NYU administration, in 2013, voluntarily recognized the UAW-affiliated graduate union after several years of bitter political fights that galvanized the city. In exchange, the union withdrew a case pending before the labor board. NYU is the only graduate union at a private college.

That may change soon. Graduate students at several campuses this week announced organizing drives. While graduate unionization at private colleges has been dominated by conversations about working conditions at elite institutions like NYU, Columbia University, and Yale University, organizing is also planned at places like St. Louis University, Syracuse University, and the University of Rochester.

A Changing View of Training

At Syracuse, like at many campuses, graduate students discussed forming a union last year after the university announced it would transition students from an employee health insurance plan to a student plan without seeking their input. While the university reversed course, the episode clarified for students the precariousness of their relationship with the university, says Samuel Leitermann, a master’s student in mathematics education at Syracuse.

Sixteen years ago, Mr. Leitermann says, graduate assistants were far more likely than they are now to view themselves as students training to be professors. With tenure-track jobs drying up in many fields and doctoral students finding employment outside academe, that view of their training has grown less persuasive, Mr. Leitermann says.

“Being an employee is being an employee,” he says. “It’s not about training to be a professor. It’s about doing work for tuition credit and pay. I don’t know if that’s how people viewed that relationship even five years ago, but that’s changing.”

In its ruling Tuesday, the labor board affirmed, unequivocally, that graduate assistants can have both an academic and an economic relationship with their university. “A graduate student,” the ruling states, “may be both a student and an employee; a university may be both the student’s educator and employer.”

The broad scope of the labor board’s definition about who constitutes an employee will give more graduate students the chance to be part of collective-bargaining units, says Bennett Carpenter, a fourth-year doctoral student in literature at Duke University and a graduate-union organizer there. The labor board included teaching assistants and also research assistants with external grants, so Duke graduate activists envision all 2,500 or so of the university’s Ph.D. students becoming part of the bargaining unit.

“In my mind,” Mr. Carpenter says, “all Ph.D. students who are performing labor in exchange for compensation, at the end of the day, regardless of whether they are partially grant-funded, are workers.”

The same sweep of the ruling that Mr. Carpenter welcomed, however, is forcing colleges’ hand to take the decision to court, says Joseph Ambash, a lawyer with Fisher & Phillips who filed a brief before the labor board on behalf of elite private colleges opposed to graduate unions.

He wonders, for example, how colleges are supposed to separate the work research assistants do for their dissertation — an educational pursuit — and work that they do as labor.

“Because this decision takes a hammer and basically smashes decades and decades of case law,” Mr. Ambash says, “I’m sure there will be appeals from Columbia or another institution. This is going to go to court.”

More Interest in Collective Bargaining

Labor relations on campuses over the past two decades have simultaneously deteriorated and attracted more attention, increasing the appetite for collective-bargaining, says Sean Collins, an organizer for Service Employees International Union Local 200 United, which is working with graduate students at Rochester and Syracuse.

“The number of adjuncts at colleges and universities has grown dramatically,” Mr. Collins says. “Colleges and universities have embraced a more corporate model instead of historically how they’ve been run, with a lot more faculty input.”

The struggles of contingent faculty members are linked with those of graduate assistants, Mr. Collins says. Both groups feel the brunt of colleges’ increased reliance on cheap labor to teach undergraduates, and both face the same battles over working conditions, including uncertainty over health insurance.

Activists say the labor board’s ruling has created renewed hope for graduate students everywhere, at both public and private colleges. It gives graduate-union movements at public colleges moral authority and momentum, says Alex Howe, a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Missouri, where graduate assistants voted to form a union and are now suing the Missouri system for union recognition.

“There have been a lot of myths perpetuated that graduate unions would damage academic relationships, mentor-mentee relationships, academic freedom,” Mr. Howe says. “They’re all completely baseless, but they have dominated the discussion. The NLRB decision just thoroughly eviscerates those myths, and that in itself is a great contribution for everybody.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.