The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that graduate students who work as teaching and research assistants at private universities are school employees who can join or form unions.

“There are people working 60 to 70 hours a week in labs, without weekends, sometime without holidays, without getting overtime or anything else,” said Bennett Carpenter, a doctoral candidate at Duke University in North Carolina, who is organizing students with the help of the Service Employees International Union. “This ruling restores our right to sit down with the university as equals and have a say in the conditions under which we work.”

The issue of whether graduate students at private universities have the right to unionize has gone back and forth, as the labor board’s sympathies have changed under Democratic and Republican administrations. The 3–1 decision overturned an earlier NLRB ruling in 2004, when George W. Bush was president. That prior decision deemed graduate students at Brown University in Rhode Island were not employees and could not engage in collective bargaining.

Teaching and research assistants at Columbia University and the New School in New York reignited the fight in 2014, filing separate petitions with the NLRB to join the United Auto Workers.

There are more than 30 collective-bargaining units representing more than 65,000 graduate students across the country, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College. Most of those groups are at public universities that are governed by state laws and not the NLRB.

New York State United Teachers, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, has organized graduate students at Cornell University. NYSUT already represents graduate students at a number of public universities, including the City University of New York and Rutgers University in New Jersey.

The Washington Post, Aug. 23
Politico, Aug. 24