Nobody Wins if Graduate Students Can’t Organize

The National Labor Relations Board announced last week that it plans to propose a rule this fall that will establish whether graduate-student workers are covered by federal labor laws that grant union rights. Although the outcome remains far from certain, early predictions are that graduate-student workers will soon be stripped of bargaining rights. This development, part of a larger movement by the Trump administration to defeat labor unions once and for all, might be viewed by some college administrators as a victory. If it is, it’s a Pyrrhic one. To retain the moral authority of the university (and keep militant labor strikes off their campus), they should see the proposal for what it is and reject it.

Skepticism would be well founded, since the current presidential administration has worked to weaken — not strengthen — the position of higher education. From cuts in research funding to Draconian immigration restrictions that make it more difficult for colleges to recruit international students to the unprecedented step of levying taxes on university endowments, the federal government of the last few years has given administrators plenty to complain about. Do they sincerely believe that, in this instance, their pleas and objections for labor-board bureaucrats to respect the sanctity of the teaching relationship have hit home? That the representatives of management interests on the labor board have had a change of heart about the importance of a robust system of doctoral education and its benefits to society?

Still, some administrators will no doubt embrace the ruling as a return to what they consider the natural order of things, to their uncontested ability to make policies that govern the daily lives of graduate workers at their institutions. College administrators face a choice, however: This is not merely about siding with the Trump administration against their own employees, students, and (if we’re being aspirational) colleagues. It’s about choosing to respect the authority of decision makers at the board who do not understand higher education, do not care about it, and could not really be much bothered to learn. It’s about willingly submitting to a ruling that determines the rights of graduate workers purely on the basis of their status as pawns in a larger labor-management game.

That isn’t a morally defensible stance. It’s also hypocritical. As colleges increasingly deploy the language of community to describe the kinds of environments they hope to create for the people who live, work, and study there, administrators have often cast unions as outside representatives who come onto campus to sow disruption and discord without understanding the special conditions and time-honored rituals of academic life. So it is difficult to see how administrators could now allow highly compensated lawyers and labor-board regulators to overturn decisions by their own graduate students to unionize without admitting that outside interference is acceptable when it suits them and when it reinforces their own prerogatives.

Here is a better path forward: If we agree that academia needs fixing, even, perhaps, defending, we might also agree that administrators have more common cause to make with graduate workers — their students, their mentees, their colleagues, to use the language of the professional workplace.

Of course, another path exists. Administrators can say that the board has made the right decision in overturning the ruling that graduate students can bargain collectively; they can celebrate that board members recognized the special conditions of graduate work as ultimately more learning than labor; and they can walk away from the issue, having put the union question to bed, at least until the next Democratic administration. Doing so risks further marginalizing a generation of teachers and researchers — scholars — struggling to find their places in a university system in which good, stable jobs have become increasingly hard to find. It risks alienating the champions that the university will need in order to endure the next round of political attacks, or worse, pushing them out of the university entirely, first gradually, then all at once.

And finally, there’s still another path, apart from that of amicable reconciliation or slow decline. Faced without options, graduate workers could become increasingly militant, using labor disruptions like slowdowns and strikes to secure the rights that the law no longer promises them. To a certain degree, these actions are already happening, at institutions like Columbia and the University of Chicago. The National Labor Relations Act, after all, was put in place to ameliorate exactly this kind of labor conflict. Without it, and without a real commitment to solving the issues that lead workers to seek union protection in the first place, administrations and unions will confront each other in an arena of pure power, an arena which no one will leave unscathed.

Colleges can avoid that scenario by remembering that there is nothing about the NLRB’s proposed rules that would prevent them from voluntarily recognizing unions of graduate employees. If university administrators want to preserve the distinctive character of their institutions, they should do so precisely by honoring the unionization decisions of graduate workers. They should allow graduate workers to make those decisions by holding representation elections, conducted fairly, privately if necessary, in good faith, and without interference. They should then respect the results of those elections, and, in institutions where a majority of graduate workers have voted for the union, they should recognize the unions and quickly bargain fair contracts. Indeed, at colleges where elections have already taken place, as long as the NLRB’s current rules remain in force, this is their legal obligation.

The result of graduate-worker unionization does not merely mean a transition from a docile cohort of isolated academics to an angry mob of conflictual, screaming need: Allowing graduate workers more control over their training, their working conditions, and ultimately, their choices in life sends a signal that an administration really is committed to sharing decision-making power and finding the best way forward for everyone.

Dennis M. Hogan is a doctoral student in comparative literature at Brown University.