Yale grad students start a union. Next, they must win bargaining rights
Source: W Post
But the nation's most elite universities are trying to make sure they don't.
By Lydia DePillis
It felt momentous, but it was mostly symbolic. Ever since the National Labor Relations Board decided in 2004 that graduate students didn't qualify as employees, they haven't had the right to organize a union that their employers — the universities — were bound to respect. Since then, universities have shifted more and more of their instructional loads from professors onto graduate students, who have simultaneously been taking on a greater share of overall student debt.
Some public schools and one private one have voluntarily agreed to bargain with graduate student groups. But under current law, they can at any time decide that they'd rather not — and Yale, like most private universities, has given little indication it's willing to do so. So while graduate student organizing has continued at dozens of schools, prospects for gaining actual bargaining power appear weak.
That could change in the next few months, when a much more labor-friendly National Labor Relations Board rules in a case concerning graduate students at Columbia University. Late last year, it invited briefs on the question of whether the board's 2004 decision should be overturned, and the board's influential general counsel submitted a brief arguing that it should: Performing work over which the university has a substantial amount of control in exchange for compensation makes a graduate student just as much of an employee as a tenured professor.
Private universities have vociferously disagreed. In their own amicus brief, the entire Ivy League plus MIT and Stanford argued that teaching is part of a graduate student's education, and that their relationship with the institution is therefore non-economic in nature. The elite schools also worry that granting grad students collective bargaining rights would interfere with academic freedom, since changes to teaching loads — even something as small as adding an essay to exam — could become the subject of extended negotiation, decreasing the flexibility of instruction.
FULL story at link.
Yale's grad students charter a union. (Courtesy UNITE-HERE)
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/11/yale-grad-students-start-a-union-next-they-must-win-bargaining-rights/
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