Partisan NLRB Reverses NYU Grad Student Decision

7/16/04 - Today, the National Labor Relations Board issued a 3-2 decision reversing the legal precedent granting graduate student employees the right to form a union and declaring that under federal law, graduate student assistants are not employees.

In addition to affecting students at Columbia, The University of Pennsylvania, and Brown, NYU may no longer recognize its Graduate Student Union when their contract expires in a year.

Unlike the NYU decision, which was unanimous, this decision broke along partisan lines with the 3 Republican appointees expressing the majority opinion and the 2 Democratic appointees forcefully dissenting. In its decision, the Republican majority rejected the precedent set in the NYU case and the decisions reached by multiple Regional Labor Board Directors. Instead, it invoked outdated decisions from the 1970s, ignoring the realities of academia today. The decision, which claims to rescue us from "the imposition" of having a contract, argues that the relationship between TAs and RAs and the universities for which they work is not economic.

The dissenting opinion, written by the two Democratic appointees, disagreed strongly, saying, "the majority's reasons, at bottom, amount to the claim that graduate student collective bargaining is simply incompatible with the nature and mission of the university. This revelation will surely come as a surprise on many campuses - not least, at New York University, a first rate institution where graduate students now work under a collective bargaining agreement reached in the wake of the decision that is overruled here."

It goes on to say: "Today's decision is woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality... It disregards the plain language of the statute - which defines employees so broadly that graduate students who perform services for, and under the control of, their universities are
easily covered - to make a policy decision that rightly belongs to Congress. The reasons offered by the majority for its decision do not
stand up to scrutiny."

It is appalling that the NLRB took more than two years to issue this obviously political decision and then did so in mid-July when many of us
are absent from campus. Now, thanks to Brown and Columbia's appeal to a Bush-appointed NLRB, graduate student employees at private universities join hundreds of thousands of other workers in this country whose rights are being denied. But we cannot stop organizing for our rights. With or without the NLRB, there's nothing stopping Columbia from recognizing GSEU and bargaining a fair contract that addresses our needs as employees -- namely, our wages and benefits as teaching and research asssitants.

We urge everyone read the NLRB decision at
http://www.2110uaw.org/gseu/NLRB%20Brown%20Decision.pdf

We will be organizing a Q & A session on the decision within the next week.

We will let you know the specifics on this shortly. We also urge all members to attend the national graduate employee union conference (CGEU) July 23-25 that we are hosting jointly with the Yale University graduate employee union. There we will discuss this decision with the other graduate employee unions.

Please visit our website at http://www.2110uaw.org for conference details and registration.