Private universities will need to recognize graduate students who conduct research and help teach classes as employees and therefore accept the unions that they form, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday.
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Partisan control of the board flipped after the 2000 election of Republican President George W. Bush, clearing the way for the 2004 decision that graduate students could not unionize. Graduate students have formed unions in more than a dozen states.
The petition from the Columbia graduate students had drawn opposition from schools including Harvard University and Stanford University.
The NLRB’s decision hinged on whether graduate students engaged in paid teaching and research as part of their degree programs should be considered employees under the National Labor Relations Act. The union represents student unions at public institutions and NYU.
Although plans are not concrete, union organizers recently posted a “roadmap” outlining the path forward on the HGSU-UAW website. “They will have the opportunity to do the right thing by recognizing our right to form a union by simply agreeing”.
It will also pose a challenge for some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, which had warned a decision in favor of the students could disrupt colleges across the country by injecting collective bargaining into graduate programs.
Columbia said in a statement that it disagrees with the ruling because the relationship students have with faculty members as part of their studies “is not the same as between employer and employee”.
But Ivy League schools have historically been opposed to having student workers unionize, and Columbia refused to formally recognize the group – spurring the labor union advocates to petition the NLRB.
Since its formation, Harvard’s graduate student unionization movement has forged a partnership with the United Auto Workers and pressured Harvard administrators to remain neutral.
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In the new decision, board members wrote that the Brown decision not only had an incorrect interpretation of the act, “but also because of the nature and consequences of that error”.
