It was almost midnight on October 24 when Greg Lehmann, a staff member at the
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United Auto (or Is That ‘Academic’?) Workers
National Labor Relations Board, slammed his fist into the first of two large cardboard boxes holding several thousand paper ballots, breaking its seal. With that punch, he began the count that would determine whether the Cornell Association of Student Employees, a United Automobile Workers affiliate, would represent more than 2,300 teaching and research assistants at Cornell University, an astounding 88.4 percent of whom had gone to the polls.
The ballots were handed to Bernard Horowitz, the NLRB agent in charge of the tabulation, who read aloud each vote. Within a few minutes, the trend was clear: Affiliation with the UAW was being rejected by a 2-to-1 vote. The final tally showed 581 in favor of the union and 1,351 against. (An additional 118 votes were not counted because of challenges.)
It was the first major defeat of a union-organizing drive since April 2000, when the NLRB declared, in a case involving New York University, that private-university teaching and research assistants could be considered employees, not students. The outcome in Ithaca, N.Y., was unforeseen and attracted national attention in light of the general success of similar unionization drives at public universities across the country.
Why did things turn out differently at Cornell? As the university’s vice president for university relations, I saw firsthand how the union campaign played out. While it is difficult to ascertain the precise reasons for the outcome, several factors should be mentioned, some of which may reflect circumstances specific to our campus.
One major factor was that, although Cornell’s teaching assistants had discussed forming a union in the mid-1990s, recent relations between the administration and graduate students were quite positive -- helped in large measure by the roles played by the former dean of the graduate school, Walter Cohen, and his successor, Alison Power. Cohen, in particular, had made himself readily accessible to all graduate students and had led efforts in the administration to improve their stipends and benefits.
It was in that context that Cornell’s president, Hunter R. Rawlings, decided not to join several other major private universities in a legal challenge to the NLRB ruling in the NYU case. Rawlings personally opposed the unionization of graduate students, but he concluded, after consulting with people on the campus and representatives of peer institutions, that such a legal strategy might hurt the university. Joining the litigation would have unnecessarily polarized many faculty members from the start, creating unprecedented conflict with the administration. Rawlings decided it would be preferable to have Cornell’s actions determined within its own environment rather than linked to situations elsewhere.
Moreover, many Cornell faculty members and administrators had previous experience, either as professors or graduate students, at public universities where graduate-assistant unionization was the norm. Some had found it beneficial; others had not. Most, however, said Cornell’s graduate students should have the right to choose for themselves. Thus, we in the senior administration decided early on to interact on this issue with graduate assistants as intelligent adults, who had been actively recruited to come to Cornell and who played important roles in the university’s instructional and research life.
The day after CASE/UAW filed its petition, in May, with the NLRB, the administration issued a statement. It said that we viewed this action with “serious concern” and noted that the “unionization of graduate students ... has the potential of significantly changing the relationship between the university and those graduate students by having them represented by a third party.” Nonetheless, the statement also said that the administration respected the right of the union-organizing group to seek certification “under the NLRB rulings in effect at this time.” We pledged to ensure that Cornell’s graduate students would be able to debate the issues openly and extensively. In return for our agreeing to schedule an election without delay, the union dropped its demand to include in the drive undergraduate and graduate students who are paid on an hourly basis for serving in some form of assistant role.
Throughout the campaign, we consciously avoided efforts that could have been seen as electioneering, recognizing that many people react negatively to being told how to vote, especially by authority figures. We encouraged small-group discussions of the issues among graduate students and faculty members. We refrained from using ideological arguments, emphasizing instead the provision of practical, timely, and accurate information. A task force -- consisting of the dean of the graduate school, the dean of continuing education, and me -- was charged with coordinating weekly electronic-mail updates and small-group briefings for professors and students.
Further, once graduate-school faculty members had returned to the campus in mid-August for the fall semester, their dean issued a detailed set of instructions reminding them of their role as supervisors. The statement said they could, as individuals, express their views on unionization, but not in any way that could intimidate their assistants, either pro or con.
On September 3, President Rawlings sent a personal message to each member of the proposed bargaining unit. He outlined the developments that had taken place throughout the summer and why he thought that unionization was not in the best interest of either the university or the graduate assistants. First and foremost was his belief that unionization would “inevitably introduce standardization and complicate the relationship between graduate students and their faculty mentors.” Furthermore, he suggested that it would be difficult to exclude all academic aspects of a graduate student’s life from the collective-bargaining process. He praised the dean of the graduate school, the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, and the Faculty Senate for their efforts to provide accurate information to all parties, and he concluded by urging all graduate students, no matter what their views on unionization, to inform themselves about the issues in the coming weeks.
Four weeks later, about 110 of Cornell’s 1,600 faculty members took out a newspaper advertisement that objected to the president’s comments and asserted that his beliefs about the potential result constituted “misrepresentation.” Yet even many of these professors acknowledged that the graduate-school dean’s guidelines for their conduct were “a model” of such instructions.
In the end, we believe that our decision to do everything possible to avoid having the election framed as a “student versus the administration” battle was crucial to the outcome. The focus on providing factual information rather than arguments proved to be a decisive strategy. Four other factors stand out:
First, the union was unable to present convincing examples of the exploitation of graduate students under the existing structure. While the union vigorously pressed for increased stipend levels, and better health and child-care benefits, many students said their support packages were competitive with those of peer institutions. They noted that, when combined with tuition remission and paid-up health insurance, the packages ranged from about $40,000 to $50,000 or more per year for a typical 20-hour workweek.
Second, an unpaid, grass-roots opposition group emerged from among the graduate assistants and mounted a vigorous campaign from its Web site, in chat rooms, and in group meetings at the department and field level. Adopting the name At What Cost? from a similar group at Brown University, these students called for and participated in public debates. At a standing-room-only forum sponsored in September by the Faculty Senate, their presence in substantial numbers made clear that not everyone was on the union bandwagon. They maintained independence from the administration and raised their own money for posters.
Third, many students did not oppose unionization but had serious concerns about affiliation with the UAW. There had been no debate on the campus about which union might be the most appropriate for Cornell’s graduate assistants. The union organizers’ inability to describe in detail the financial support they were receiving from the UAW also rankled many in the proposed bargaining unit.
Fourth, the union organizers’ intense efforts may have backfired. Students complained of receiving eight or more telephone calls at home that urged them to vote in favor of the union. For some students, such calls were as popular as those from telemarketers at the dinner hour, as were the frequent visits from some organizers to labs and offices.
What should other institutions do if a union drive hits their campus? Offering advice to universities with widely different circumstances demands a healthy dose of temerity, but a few suggestions might be helpful.
Senior administrators should evaluate carefully the specific situation at their institution. They should talk to graduate students in an array of disciplines on a regular basis, soliciting their sense of the issues and their perspectives on the university and its departments. Administrators should resist the pressure to adopt an industrial model of labor-management relations and instead interact with their graduate students as vital contributors to the institution. And they should consider that it may be counterproductive to respond to every statement made by union advocates in the heat of an election campaign, remembering that a sense of humor can go a long way toward maintaining good relations.
Over all, people on both sides believe the campaign at Cornell was waged fairly and with mutual respect. The union has pledged to continue its efforts, although it cannot seek another vote for at least one year. We will see what develops in the interim, both here in Ithaca and across the nation.
Henrik N. Dullea is vice president for university relations at Cornell University.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 19, Page B16
