Graduate student unionization

I did not know that you needed permission to unionize: where is this New York University? In North Korea?

The article says that previously graduate students were considered to be students, not employees, and so did not have the right to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act.

You really shouldn’t need permission to unionize, but the application of labor law to student workers gets a little sticky, which creates problems like the one we have at NYU.

I’ve been involved, to one degree or another, in two unionization drives at universities, albeit public ones. The basic claim that university administrations make at the outset when they oppose a union for ASEs (academic student employees) is that said ASEs are not actually employees. According to this argument, the teaching duties of a graduate TA, for example, constitute “professional development” (or some similar term) that is fundamentally part of that student’s education, just like going to a class or a seminar. The idea is that the TA’s status as a student somehow overrides the fact that the TA is doing work for the university, is responsible to superiors for the performance of this work, and is paid for this work (a situation in which everyone else would be defined as “employees”).

Labor relations at public universities are governed by state labor laws, court decisions, etc., so unionizing ASEs at those places has been relatively easier; private universities have a much freer hand in opposing ASE unionization.

lt is the expert here. But the original poist is a bit misleading — the Bush-era ruling was not that grad students were not permitted to unionize, but simply that they could not take use the NLRB process for doing so — federally supervised elections, etc. There was never any prohibition on voluntary recognition by the university.

To find positive prohibitions on grad student unions, you need to go to public universities in the various (mostly Southern) states where public employee unionization is illegal.

Also, whenever this subject comes up I feel obliged to point out that while the overwhelming bulk of attention in liberal forums like CT goes to the handful of unionization attempts at elite private schools, the graduate student union movement in the US is almost entirely a movement of students at state schools, who are not affected by this decision at all.

#5: It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that the graduate students at NYU have had a labor union all along. A union is a specific sort of legal entity and as such its existence depends on legal recognition. A group of people claiming to be, or to be part of, a union is just that: a group of people claiming to be or to be part of a union. No legal recognition, no union. Likewise, I can claim my partner and I are married, but because marriage is a legal status, my claim is empty unless I’ve secured that status from the relevant governmental body. See also corporations, and etc… The fact that GSOC is associated with and funded by the UAW does not magically transform the GSOC into a union.

I go to the trouble of pointing this out because I hope the best for the NYU grad students, but I’m familiar with the sort of rhetoric on display in #5, and it turned many graduate students against the unionization efforts at the private university where I attended graduate school. Organizers seemed to think that we would all sign on if they just threw enough spin at us. And that spin edged into outright lying on occasion. Many of us decided we could trust neither the local organizers nor its umbrella organization. The organizers never had majority support (though they constantly tried to claim they did…) and they really had only themselves to blame. I arrived to graduate school as a former union member (warehouse work: the sort of thing that gets a person back into school!) and was predisposed to support the unionization effort, but the disingenuousness, the lying, and the gratuitous manichaeanism had me reconsidering pretty quickly. It was disappointing, to say the least.

When trade unions were first formed, they certainly did not have legal recognition. Often they were in fact banned. The employers of course refused to negotiate with them, until they unions forced them to. But they were still trade unions all along, wheter they were legal or illegal.

Norwegian Guy responded adequately to Giotto, so perhaps I don’t need to. I will only say that Giotto’s claim that a union only exists when recognized by an employer negates an awful lot of the history of the labor movement in the United States and elsewhere. It also presupposes a very particular model of labor organizing–one that excludes, say, the IWW, which traditionally does not seek official or legal recognition (although sometimes does nowadays).

This is relevant because of Lemuel’s claim that there are southern states that ban public employee unions. Without in any way diminishing the problems of state labor law regimes in those states, it’s not that public employee unions are banned, it’s that collective bargaining is banned. Collective bargaining is only one–albeit large–part of what unions do. This is attested to by the existence, in North Carolina, of UE local 150, the State Employees Union of North Carolina, the North Carolina Association of Educators, all of which are unions, and none of which have the legal ability to collectively bargain.

Jacob,

You are right, I expressed that sloppily. And in fact, it’s my understanding that in Texas — and I assume in other states where collective bargaining by public employees is prohibited — there are processes of “consultation” with unions that provide a more or less effective substitute for formal negotiations over working conditions and pay.

Well, I’m speaking as a former elected official of UAW Local 2322, which represents graduate employees at the University of Massachusetts. So there.

Anyway, all your points are correct, strategically. But personally, come on, doesn’t the disproportionate attention to grad unions at private schools bug you even a little?

I was a grad student at the University of Illinois when they began the drive for unionization. Although I opposed the union, I think the argument that we were merely students and not employees was specious. That said, the proposed union was sleazy in their methods. Using a ‘card check’ system, they told grad students that signing the card was a ‘vote to have a vote’ when, in fact, the card check would have been a binding vote if the courts sided with the ’employee’ position.

Like all unions, they restrict supply to achieve higher wages and benefits. The number of teaching assistants at the University of Michigan went flat, despite student growth, the moment the union was instituted. This translated into greater class sizes and more rejection letters for aid or admissions to future grad students. Other university budgets were stressed and this put upward pressure on tuition. The unions achieve gains for themselves at the expense of everyone else, including prospective union members.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only university which denied my admission was the only one that had an existing grad student union. The victims are invisible. Unlike auto workers whose greed results in their own unemployment, grad student unions put future generations of grad students out of work (and out of school).

I feel I was well-paid as a TA and was often offered supplementary opportunities to teach for more income. It was mainly the TAs from Fine Arts and foreign languages and other liberal arts which felt underpaid. They apparently never learned the lessons of economics that wages are based on one’s marginal revenue product. With low demand for these practically worhless majors, demand for their labor was low. And they conveniently ignored the in-kind benefit of free tuition. It’s ironic that dropout rates and time to complete the PhD were much higher, on average, for these ‘career’ TAs. For the rest of us, the opportunity cost of remaining in grad school was so high, we worked hard to get out fast.

One only need to look at the massive deficits and underfunded pensions in California to see the inherent dangers of public sector unions or any union where the collective bargainers and the administration are separated from the primary stakeholders: voters or undergrads.