Your posts reveal a laughable ‘understanding’ (if I can call it that) of political and social life. You’re describing the employer-employee relationship (in this case, university-teacher/graduate student) as if all that mattered about it from a moral/social point of view was the fact that both side have signed a contract. Nothing else matters to you—certainly not the unequal power relations between the two sides to the contract.

No, it’s not morally okay for an organization to fire strikers—and many countries (including even the U.S., I believe) have laws about that. And the reason why it’s not okay is that the right to strike (and the right NOT to get fired while striking) is one of the only ways in which a fairer balance of power between employer and employee can be achieved. Of course, you can deny that equality of that sort is morally important. But then you’ll have to argue for it.

To which of the three points above do you object? If a teacher won’t do his job, should the university be barred from replacing him with someone who will, or perhaps forced to fire the replacement when the original teacher decides that it wasn’t such a good idea after all? Should teachers not be expected to teach their classes? Or should universities be barred from giving honest and factual performance evaluations upon request?

1. Those who don’t do their jobs will be fired, and will be ineligible to be rehired for five months.

2. Those who are hired in the future will be required to promise to perform faithfully for the duration of their employment the duties for which they were hired.

3. A prospective employer inquiring about the performance of someone fired for failing to do his job will be told that the employee in question was fired for failing to do his job.

Appalling!

1. Creating a blacklist of strike participants. (This is what Brandon so charmingly dismisses as firing people for not doing their jobs.)

2. Requiring that those who are given teaching jobs next semester promise not to participate in any future job actions. As Lafer mentions, making employment contingent on a promise not to engage in concerted actions is a “yellow dog contract” and was made illegal even before the Wagner Act. It’s unclear (at least to me) whether graduate teachers are currently covered by this prior act, and therefore whether Sexton’s requirement is illegal or merely unethical.

3. In Lafer’s words: “Sexton suggests that those who participate in strike actions but, God forbid, graduate before they can be punished, may have negative assessments attached to their university record when they apply for jobs at other schools. This type of blacklisting has not been seen since the dark days of McCarthyism.”

If that’s not appalling behavior, I’m not sure what is.

Fine. But employers should be able to fire them for not doing their jobs. Don’t bother telling me that the law says otherwise. If the law says otherwise, the law is an ass.

Yes, I’m aware of that, but I think it’s fairly obvious that they are employees. I’m just pointing out the absurdity of referring to threatening to fire employees for not doing their jobs as “appalling behaviour.”

However, you are correct; I should have left out the modifier “vaguely” to be more in accord with the pro-grad-union talking points, which hold that students would support the union if only their anti-grad-union advisors and chairs would stop frightening them into silence. As I noted, history grad students at Yale supported the union cause despite the position of their chair. And as others here have noted, support for unionization does vary from division to division and from department to department due to what is surely a bewildering array of factors. The suggestion, very common at Yale, that a majority of grad students would support the union if only the faculty and administration would stop intimidating them is rubbish and is insulting. It is insulting to the graduate students, who can weigh the evidence and make our own decisions, thank you, and is insulting to the many many professors here who have reservations about the union but who are willing to let the graduate students weigh the evidence and make their own decisions.

Reiterating Dan Nexon’s point: To say this is to acknowledge that they’re employees. As such, they generally should have a right to bargain collectively, and I believe that their employer is subject to severe constraints—and in most cases statutorily prohibited—from punitive dismissals, which is what not hiring them for the spring semester amounts to. (Btw, would NYU be able to come up with all the needed replacements in the available time, or will it try to force some of the researchers back into the classroom???)

As to tuition—the dismissed strikers will suddenly receive a fat tuition bill for the present semester or the spring semester. I could be wrong, of course, but I don’t see how it would make much of difference to them which it is.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZT! Wrong answer! ‘their department chair vociferously opposes the union’ does not equate to ‘vaguely sinister explanations’.

Well, Brandon, if you’d read the background information you would know that, according to the University (and now the NLRB) the graduate students are not employees. If they were employees, they would have a right to form a union and be protected by relevant employment law. But since they’re not employees, they can be “fired” for striking in their attempt to keep their union. But, as you yourself note, the justification for “firing” them would seem to imply that they are employees. Oh, the head spins.

In their comments they stick to the merits of the dispute, the ius ad bellum as it were. But the post here isn’t about the ius ad bellum but about the way the administration has conducted itself in the conflict: the ius in bello .

Boghossian makes much (too much) of his liberal, Democratic and pro-labor views. Surely it is reasonable to ask about whether it is consistent to espouse such values at the same time as endorsing the tactics employed by the NYU administration? But perhaps Boghossian is embarassed by those tactics, which would explain why he fails to discuss them.