Graduate students seeking to form unions at private colleges have gained new momentum from the recent success of their counterparts at New York University, which agreed to let the students vote on forming a collective-bargaining unit.
Spurred by the outcome of the NYU unionization effort, which resulted in a vote for a United Auto Workers affiliate on the campus, graduate students at Yale University are the latest to press for the right to form a bargaining unit. The Yale students say a union would ensure fair treatment of a class of employees with growing workloads who play an increasingly larger role in the university.
“There’s an understanding of the really powerful opening that the NYU example provides,” said Aaron Greenberg, a Yale Ph.D. student in political science and chair of the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, a group pushing for a graduate-student union at Yale.
The United Auto Workers affiliate at NYU is in the process of negotiating a contract there.
“It’s the only example we have of a private university voluntarily and collaboratively agreeing to a free and fair process that would allow graduate teachers and researchers to decide on the union question,” Mr. Greenberg said.
Advocates of unions are also encouraged by the prospect that the National Labor Relations Board may reconsider a key 2004 ruling involving Brown University that for the past decade has limited the ability of graduate students at private universities to organize.
The 2004 decision said graduate assistants are not employees because their relationship with the university is primarily educational. But in March, in a case involving a bid by Northwestern University football players to unionize, a regional office of the NLRB said scholarship athletes are employees, with the right to unionize. The College Athletes Players Association, in their argument to the full labor board in April, said the Brown case should be overruled. Experts say it appears likely that the labor board would eventually revisit that ruling.
At Yale, meanwhile, graduate students marched in the rain in April to deliver a petition that organizers say had 1,000 signatures—the same number that NYU students delivered to their administration last year—to Yale’s president, Peter Salovey. The students cited the NYU example and asked Yale to “develop a fair process for graduate employees to decide on union representation.”
Mr. Greenberg expressed optimism about their efforts. Given the number of students who signed the petition, he said, he expects administrators to be willing to talk about a process, just as the NYU administration did with students there. He has not yet heard directly from Yale administrators.
Tom Conroy, a Yale spokesman, said Mr. Salovey was unavailable for an interview. “Yale University and the Graduate School have worked and will continue to work productively with faculty and students, including the Graduate Student Assembly, on the issues identified by the petition,” said a statement provided by Mr. Conroy. “We are committed to the best possible academic outcomes for our students.”
As of last fall, Yale had more than 2,600 registered Ph.D. students. Brian Dunican, a former chairman of the Graduate Student Assembly, said he suspects that the largest portion of them are undecided on the unionization question.
Stipends at Yale are competitive, ranging from $28,400 to $33,000 per year, he said, and students are unsure how unionizing would improve conditions.
A Resurgence?
Graduate students at public colleges, too, have sought to improve their working conditions through unionization. Public universities are subject to state labor laws, so the NLRB ruling does not apply to their graduate students.
Graduate assistants at the University of Connecticut formed a union last month, after the university’s Board of Trustees voted to remain neutral in the effort. Graduate students at the University of Kansas are exploring unionization out of concern that the university may cut graduate students’ work hours in response to the Affordable Care Act. The federal health-care law requires employers to provide coverage to employees who work at least 30 hours a week.
At private universities, the NYU agreement is fueling new interest in organizing, said Matt Canfield, who is in a Ph.D. program in anthropology at NYU and helped organize the collective-bargaining effort there. He said he had had conversations with graduate students at many private universities in the months following the NYU union vote.
“We’ll soon see the resurgence of a broader movement,” Mr. Canfield said. “Graduate employees at private universities are trying to set the groundwork for organizing.”
But he and others acknowledged the challenges that remain for advocates of unionization at private universities. The problems include opposition from administrations and the difficulty of organizing students who are very busy and who cycle out of the university every few years.
The deal between NYU and its graduate students came as the administration was under pressure, giving unionization efforts more momentum than they might enjoy elsewhere. The agreement was brokered as a case was pending before the NLRB. The Graduate Student Organizing Committee of the United Auto Workers was asking the labor board to reverse its 2004 Brown decision. The NYU deal ended that case.
Unionization advocates had also gathered support from politicians across New York City and the state following the university’s decision in 2005 to no longer bargain with the union, in light of the Brown decision. Mr. Canfield said the committee increased its efforts in 2012 and had gained the support of more than 250 elected officials, including many City Council members and state legislators.
“From an organizing perspective, we were putting a lot of pressure on the administration,” he said.
William B. Gould IV, a former chairman of the NLRB, said NYU had probably agreed to the deal because of “a combination of bad publicity and reading the tea leaves” that the labor board would overturn the Brown decision.
He said graduate students at private colleges should be hopeful about future unionization prospects because the board is interested in reconsidering the Brown decision.
Mr. Canfield and others said they were not aware of unionization efforts at private colleges that were as advanced as those at Yale, where graduate students have been seeking to organize for a long time. Mr. Greenberg’s group, GESO, was founded in 1991.
Elsewhere, graduate students at institutions including Cornell University and the University of Chicago have stepped up conversations about efforts to unionize.
Andrew Yale, a Ph.D. student in an English program at the University of Chicago, said he had looked forward to an NLRB ruling in the NYU case before the agreement was reached there. If the ruling had gone in favor of the graduate students, it would have created a path to unionize at other private colleges.
Mr. Yale is on the organizing committee of Graduate Students United, a group that wants a union that would be recognized by Chicago. It has advocated for issues like affordable on-campus child care and private spaces for nursing mothers. He said group members are “contemplating our options” following the NYU agreement.
That deal, he said, “provides a very promising model for advancing graduate-employee unionization at private universities.”
