A Big Blow for Grad Students at Private Universities

This article reports that,

"The fast-growing movement to unionize graduate students at the nation's private universities suffered a crushing setback yesterday when the National Labor Relations Board reversed itself and ruled that students who worked as research and teaching assistants did not have the right to unionize.

"In a case involving Brown University, the labor board ruled 3 to 2 that graduate teaching and research assistants were essentially students, not workers, and thus should not have the right to unionize to negotiate over wages, benefits and other conditions of employment.

"The Republican-controlled board reversed a four-year-old decision involving New York University, a private institution, in which the board, then controlled by Democrats, concluded that graduate teaching and research assistants should be able to unionize because their increased responsibilities had essentially turned them into workers."

This is very bad news for graduate students at private universities--though it shall at least save us the disgraceful spectacle of senior professors offering tortured explanations, based on no evidence, of why unions would destroy graduate education.

At Michigan, the TAs were unionized when I went there. It had no negative impact on student/faculty relations, mentoring, or anything of educational significance. It did mean that we were paid much better than the grad students at, for example, Yale, and we had better benefits and more reasonable teaching loads.

It is true that competition for students at the better programs creates some pressure towards better working conditions for teaching assistants, but, like all market pressures, it is unpredictable and uneven. And at least some arrogant private schools that can trade on the prestige of their "name" regardless of the quality of the program can be expected to shortchange their graduate students.

One potential countervailing force, not available when I went to graduate school, is the Internet, which makes it very easy to get information about working conditions for teaching assistants. The burden will now fall to students to educate themselves about comparative working conditions, and to make decisions based on that information. Only when the faculty start losing the students they want to the schools with unionized teaching assistants and better working conditions will the serial exploiters of graduate-student labor reform.

Of course, the preferred outcome would be if the NLRB faced up to the reality of the situation, and permitted graduate students at private universities to unionize. Depending on how things go in November, maybe that will happen a year from now.