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[NYCmetsfan]

https://www.buzzfeed.com/coralewis/...gue-objections?utm_term=.ieE7z8pp3#.xmjoadEEO

Graduate students working at private colleges and universities are now free to unionize, after a government panel ruled they should be considered employees of their school.

The ruling by the National Labor Relations Board overturned a 2004 decision that declared them fundamentally students, not employees. The new ruling determined that they are both, and should be protected by federal labor law.

It means TA’s and graduate student workers at private schools may unionize and collectively bargain over working conditions, as such students at many public universities already do. (Workers at public universities are covered by state, not federal law.) As recognized employees, graduate students will also be protected by law from retaliation and sexual harassment.

Union organizing drives for graduate workers are currently underway at Harvard, Yale, the New School, Cornell, Duke, and Northwestern, in addition to Columbia University, whose unionization drive, supported by the United Auto Workers union, sparked the case.

“Student assistants who have a common-law employment relationship with their university are statutory employees,” the NLRB ruled, saying the 2004 decision “deprived an entire category of workers of the protections of the Act without a convincing justification.”

Graduate students and non-tenure-tracked staff have filled an increasing number of university campus positions in recent years — teaching, grading, and providing research assistance at a fraction of the cost of full professors.
...
In a joint amicus brief submitted to the board, colleges including Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale said that unionizing teaching staff could intrude on academic freedom. “Both collective bargaining and arbitration are, by their very nature, adversarial,” the schools said. “They clearly have the potential to transform the collaborative model of graduate education to one of conflict and tension.”

 

[entremet]

Damn, no one cares for poor grad students

Here's a recent New Yorker article on it.

The law has never put the dichotomy so starkly, of course, and students at state schools are just lucky that those institutions are governed by generally more union-friendly state laws, not by the fickle federal board. But the grad-student-union movement at private schools is decades old—by some counts, the fight at Yale is the longest-lasting struggle for union recognition in the country—and throughout its history its opponents, including me, once upon a time, have relied on the élitist logic that unions are for other people, not for our kind.

The standard argument against graduate-student unions, one adopted by the lone dissenter in last week’s federal ruling, is that graduate students are “primarily” students, and that any work they do, like leading discussion sections or grading papers, is educational in nature—that is, they are learning a skill that they will need on the job market. And, the argument goes, if on occasion they do actual labor, they still should not be able to join a union, because the adversarial nature of collective bargaining would threaten to undermine the primary relationship, that of student to professor, advisee to mentor.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/graduate-students-the-laborers-of-academia?mbid=rss

Kinda crazy how knowledge workers are wacky about unions even if it would benefit them.