Graduate students at Columbia University count as employees under federal labor law and may now vote to unionize, the Democrat-controlled National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday.
The ground-breaking 3-1 decision has major financial and academic implications for private colleges and universities across the United States, home to more than 500,000 graduate students. It’s also a major boon to organized labor at a time when membership has been declining for years.
The NLRB deals exclusively with private-sector disputes. In 2004, it effectively blocked graduate students at private colleges and universities from organizing, writing in its Brown University decision that grad students “have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university.”
In its ruling Tuesday, however, the NLRB reversed the Brown decision, claiming that it had “deprived an entire category of workers of the protections of the (National Labor Relations) Act without a convincing jurisdiction.”
Until now, private universities have often provided stipends, health care coverage, tuition waivers and other benefits to graduate students; instead of treating them as salaried employees, the universities have argued that they are still students gaining an education and work preparation.
When graduate students organize, it can saddle universities with a major financial burden.
New York University is among the only private institutions to allow its grad students to organize—and in 2002, when it reached its first labor agreement with its newly unionized grad students, labor costs increased by more than 50 percent in the subsequent four-year period.
Some of those increased costs will likely result in higher tuition costs for incoming students.
But private universities have cautioned that the academic implications may be even bigger than the financial ones.
Seven Ivy League Universities, along with Stanford and MIT, filed an amicus brief to the NLRB warning that “both collective bargaining and arbitration are, by their very nature, adversarial.”
The brief claimed it was a “near certainty” that such a bargaining process “will irrevocably damage graduate education in the private sector and potentially undergraduate education as well.”
Joseph Ambash, the lawyer who represented Brown University in the 2004 NLRB case, recently told the Chicago Tribune that allowing graduate students to organize at private colleges and universities would be “fraught with confusion and tremendous difficulties.”
Wages and salaries would not be the only topics on the table in any union-management negotiations, Ambash argued. Graduate students could also potentially bargain over curriculums, course lengths, graduation standards and more — fundamentally changing private-sector higher education.
Right now, graduate students have formed collective-bargaining units at just 34 universities in the United States, almost all of them public. But in recent years, students at Yale, Harvard, Cornell, the University of Chicago and other private universities have all pushed to organize.
The Columbia University decision could add tens of thousands of new members to the union rosters nationwide at a time when organized labor has contracted.
Last year, just 11.1 percent of workers belonged to a union. In 1983—the first year the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking membership–more than two in 10 workers did.
“This latest ruling is just another in a long line of pro-union mandates designed to tip the scales in favor of Big Labor,” says Richard Berman, executive director of the Center for Union Facts, a nonprofit that has been largely critical of organized labor. “The NLRB has become a rogue agency serving the interests of dues-hungry union bosses instead of nonunion employees.”
— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for Heat Street and is a fellow for the Steamboat Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum.
