During the eight years that Matilda Stubbs has been pursuing a doctorate at Northwestern University, graduate students who work as teaching and research assistants have been trying to form a union — “a very depressing experience,” she said, that hasn’t gone much of anywhere.
But a major ruling expected soon from the National Labor Relations Board could be a game changer if it deems graduate students to be university employees and therefore entitled to collective bargaining rights.
The academic world is watching to see if the NLRB reverses a 2004 Brown University decision that found grad students have a primarily educational relationship with the school and are not statutory employees.
The decision at hand stems from two separate petitions filed by groups of graduate students at Columbia University and at the New School in New York who wish to join the United Auto Workers. A regional NLRB director rejected both petitions, citing the Brown case, and the NLRB is reviewing the findings.
While it isn’t clear when the ruling will come down, conventional wisdom holds that it will happen before NLRB member Kent Hirozawa, an appointee of President Barack Obama, reaches the end of his term Aug. 27.
If the panel decides in favor of the grad students — and, given its Democratic majority, many expect it will — it could clear hurdles to unionization efforts at private universities across the country.
To Stubbs, whose experience as a teaching assistant felt like work more than learning, a ruling in favor of the grad students would reinvigorate organizing efforts that already have seen a boost with the nationwide push to unionize adjuncts and other nontenured faculty.
“As students and as workers, we have a different relationship than someone who is just a student,” said Stubbs, 32, who is six months away from completing her doctorate in anthropology. “This is our livelihood, these (faculty members) are our colleagues.”
But Joseph Ambash, an attorney with Fisher Phillips who represented Brown University in the 2004 ruling that the NLRB could overturn, said deeming grad students employees “is fraught with confusion and tremendous difficulties.”
“We could have a sea change in private sector graduate education if it is decided that research assistants are employees,” Ambash said.
Graduate students at many top-tier private universities are expected to serve as teaching assistants or research assistants as part of the requirements to get their doctorates. They receive a package of financial support that includes an annual stipend, free tuition and free health insurance.
Calling students employees and allowing them to bargain disrupts the educational nature of the arrangement and raises concerns about what is up for negotiation, including academic decisions, Ambash said. Could they bargain about curriculum? About course length? About standards for graduating? The National Labor Relations Act doesn’t set any limits, and it is unclear if the board will do so in its ruling, Ambash said.
Even if the bargaining focused on wages and working conditions, to call work done as part of a dissertation requirement a job is, Ambash said, “ridiculous.”
“Students spend all night long in the lab (as research assistants),” Ambash said. “Now they’re going to bargain about how many hours they work?” He filed an amicus brief asking the NLRB to uphold the Brown University decision on behalf of nine elite schools, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cornell and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Stubbs, a single mother who has served as a teaching assistant for four courses at Northwestern, doesn’t think academic decisions would come into play.
Unionizing is important to her so that grad students can bargain for better health coverage, more assistance for students with dependents and to generally have a voice in decisions about their working lives. As it is now, there is no body representing grad students’ interests, and people’s experiences are inconsistent and largely dependent on their relationships with their departments, she said.
Without recognition as employees, grad students don’t get basic protections, she said, like the right to unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. When she gave birth to her son, Cosmos, in 2012, she said it was lucky he happened to arrive during spring break, because she wasn’t granted any time off.
“It’s really surprising to me, in a place with so much privilege,” Stubbs said, getting upset as she recalled the stress of the situation.
Graduate students occupy a fuzzy middle ground between being students and workers. Stubbs was taxed on her teaching stipend, which was $17,303 last she received it in the 2014-2015 school year, suggesting “it’s compensation, it’s income,” she said. The university has since raised the base stipend to more than $29,000, a move Stubbs believes was done to dissuade grad students from organizing.
Though graduate students are apprentices to faculty members in some ways, she said her teaching work came with no training in how to design a syllabus or grade a paper.
“I wasn’t learning, I was a worker bee,” she said. “This is labor performed outside of a learning context.”
Graduate student unions are not a new concept, and the NLRB has gone back-and-forth on the issue over the years. The 2004 Brown decision reversed a 2000 decision in a New York University case in which the NLRB determined that just because grad students are “primarily students” doesn’t mean they can’t also be employees.
There are 34 collective bargaining units of graduate students in the U.S., the vast majority at public universities, which are governed by state labor laws and not the National Labor Relations Act, according to Bill Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, which is based at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.
New York University, which voluntarily recognized its graduate student union in 2014, is a rare private university with a collective bargaining agreement for graduate students. Cornell University recently formed an agreement with its graduate students that paves the way for them to vote on unionization should the NLRB overrule the Brown decision, and there are ongoing efforts to organize at several other universities.
At the University of Chicago, a group called Graduate Students United has roughly 600 members. Although they are not recognized as employees by the NLRB and don’t have legal collective bargaining rights, the group says its advocacy has won substantial concessions from university administration, including pay increases, better health care, improved parental leave policies and stipends for child care.
If the NLRB rules in favor of the Columbia and New School grad students, it “will be a huge step forward, both in that we will be able to bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions, and also in that we will be recognized as workers,” said Eric Powell, 31, a doctoral candidate in English Language and Literature at the U. of C. and a member of Graduate Students United, which is jointly affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors.
Willemien Otten, a professor in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago and president of the AAUP advocacy chapter, which supports the right of grad students to unionize, said that the work grad students do is more work than education.
“What really enhances your study is your dissertation and not the experience of teaching the classes,” said Otten, who uses several grad students as teaching assistants, or TAs. “Whether (teaching) is the key experience that lands them a tenure job is doubtful.”
In addition, if the grad students didn’t teach the classes, the university would have to hire additional faculty, she said.
Graduate students are part of a long trend in academia that has put most of the teaching in the hands of nontenured instructors, which has prompted a recent push to unionize adjuncts who lament low pay and instability, driven largely by the Service Employees International Union. About 75 percent of teaching faculty at U.S. schools are not on the tenure track, and a quarter of those are graduate students.
While dealing with a graduate student union may be a hassle for the university at first, it also will provide more clarity around the relationship, Otten said.
“How much do you make a TA work? When are you asking too much of a TA?” she said. “I think that when you’re around a table, that’s a good thing.”
aelejalderuiz@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @alexiaer
This story has been amended to clarify the agreement Cornell University formed with its graduate students.
