A 2016 ruling gave graduate-student unions at Columbia U. and other such institutions, like Brown and Harvard, the right to bargain collectively. Now, under President Trump, the NLRB may take that right away.
Graduate students at private colleges may lose their right to form unions, under a proposed rule released on Friday by the National Labor Relations Board.
It’s a possibility that advocates of graduate-student unionization have feared since the election of Donald J. Trump. The labor board has been nakedly political on this topic, depending on which party controls the White House.
The board has flip-flopped for decades on giving graduate students at private colleges the right to form unions. Collective bargaining at public colleges is subject to state law, but private-college unions were first granted the right by a Bill Clinton-era labor board, in a case involving New York University. A labor board under George W. Bush took away the bargaining right in a 2004 case involving Brown University. Under Barack Obama, the board gave it back in its 2016 ruling about unions at Columbia University.
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Jaime Danies
A 2016 ruling gave graduate-student unions at Columbia U. and other such institutions, like Brown and Harvard, the right to bargain collectively. Now, under President Trump, the NLRB may take that right away.
Graduate students at private colleges may lose their right to form unions, under a proposed rule released on Friday by the National Labor Relations Board.
It’s a possibility that advocates of graduate-student unionization have feared since the election of Donald J. Trump. The labor board has been nakedly political on this topic, depending on which party controls the White House.
The board has flip-flopped for decades on giving graduate students at private colleges the right to form unions. Collective bargaining at public colleges is subject to state law, but private-college unions were first granted the right by a Bill Clinton-era labor board, in a case involving New York University. A labor board under George W. Bush took away the bargaining right in a 2004 case involving Brown University. Under Barack Obama, the board gave it back in its 2016 ruling about unions at Columbia University.
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Since the 2016 Columbia ruling, 15 graduate-student union elections have been held at private colleges. Five colleges — American, Brandeis, New York, and Tufts Universities, and the New School — have collective-bargaining contracts with their students. Four others have certified or recognized graduate unions — Brown, Columbia, Georgetown, and Harvard.
But what the board is proposing now is new. Rather than looking at the facts in any case before it, the board is aiming to create an overarching rule that would exclude teaching and research assistants from being covered by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.
“What’s troubling about this rulemaking is that the entity responsible for deciding which classes of employees are covered under the National Labor Relations Act is Congress,” says William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at the City University of New York’s Hunter College. “The rule is seeking by administrative action to essentially amend the statute. Congress is the entity that amends statutes, not an administrative agency.”
Here is a collection of articles from The Chronicle about recent unionization efforts by graduate students, rulings that have aided them, and how the picture may change under a new administration.
John F. Ring, the labor board’s chairman, said the rulemaking is intended to “bring stability” to this area of federal labor law. But a future labor board could change the rule again, or Congress could intervene, Herbert said.
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Graduate assistants have provided an increasing amount of labor at universities, from teaching undergraduates in classrooms to helping professors conduct research in laboratories, so their relationship with their institutions is at least partially economic, bargaining-rights advocates have argued. Opponents say they are primarily students.
Ring, Marvin E. Kaplan, and William J. Emanuel, all Republicans on the five-member board, approved the rulemaking notice. Lauren McFerran, a Democrat, dissented, calling the distinction between economic and educational relationships “made up,” according to Law360, a legal website.
Herbert said the rulemaking proposal would allow the agency to consider empirical evidence in its analysis. That, he said, should include an examination of the five current collective-bargaining contracts at private colleges and a robust trove of contracts over decades at public colleges.
Vimal Patel, a reporter at The New York Times, previously covered student life, social mobility, and other topics for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
