My Comments to the NLRB on Their Proposed Student Employee Rule

The NLRB is proposing to eliminate union organizing and collective bargaining rights for student employees. Here I tell the NLRB some reasons why that’s wrong.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) proposes to eliminate the rights of student employees at private universities to organize a union and bargain collectively under the National Labor Relations Act, with the argument that they are not really “employees.” This is part of the Trump NLRB’s anti-worker campaign. The proposed rule is published here.

I have experience as a graduate student employee and union member from my years at the University of Michigan and have written previously about this issue here and here. Below are my comments sent to the NLRB, which can be found here. In these comments, I tried to follow the mix of results of my twitter poll:

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I write in opposition to the Board’s proposed rule change regarding students at private universities and urge the Board to keep the current policy of recognizing the rights of student employees to organize a union and engage in collective bargaining.

I was once a graduate student at the University of Michigan and a member and officer of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) for a number of years. While at Michigan, I came to understand that while we were obviously students, we also played a vital role at the university as employees. We taught a large proportion of the classes and were compensated for it. This work was essential for the functioning of the university and not simply teacher training for a future job as a professor. Our union negotiated for wage increases, decent health care, and fair employment rules, all of which helped our members during the many years we spent in graduate school.

Of course GEO at Michigan operated under state law as a collective bargaining unit of public employees, but the issues regarding graduate students at private universities are exactly the same. We all do the same crucial work for compensation as employees, while also pursuing graduate degrees as students.

The proposed rule cites the Board’s Brown decision rejecting employee status because graduate students have a “primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university.” However, this fails to understand an essential element of the political economy of the modern university. Schools are not simply admitting graduate students and then finding work for them to do as part of their studies or financial aid. Schools are also in effect recruiting an essential temporary workforce for their teaching and research work. Indeed, graduate student employees comprise over 20% of the university teaching staff, according to the Economic Policy Institute, with an additional more than 50% non-tenured track adjunct lecturers.

Higher education now has a firmly entrenched two-tier teaching system that the Board cannot ignore, with good jobs for tenured professors and precarious work for the vast majority. Moreover, so many graduate students are admitted that most will never get a job as a tenured professor, which is itself an incentive to organize a union for improvements now, and to support adjunct organizing efforts as well.

The familiar paradigm of graduate school solely as training for a tenured faculty job, under the close and caring supervision of a professor, is a thing of the past, if it ever really existed. But it still serves as a useful myth to obscure the current labor relations of an increasingly corporate university.

Indeed the Board’s proposed rule appears to be misled by this myth, stating “Faculty members educate, evaluate, and mentor students. Collective bargaining over those matters appears to be inappropriate given that faculty and students are engaged in an individualized learning experience.” This misunderstands the situation, ignoring the powerful role of the university administration, the primary collective bargaining counterpart that is relevant here, and the common issues of wages, benefits and working conditions that pertain to all graduate student employees.

It should be clear that if graduate students weren’t doing all this work, then schools would have to hire other employees to do it. In fact, the Board’s Columbia decision treated this dual status correctly. When considering the roles of student and employee, it properly recognized that it is simply not necessary to determine whether the relationship is primarily student or employee — the employee status is all that matters. Columbia states:

The Board has the statutory authority to treat student assistants as statutory employees, where they perform work, at the direction of the university, for which they are compensated. Statutory coverage is permitted by virtue of an employment relationship; it is not foreclosed by the existence of some other, additional relationship that the Act does not reach.

That decision also noted that over 64,000 graduate student employees are now engaging in collective bargaining at many public schools. Thus it is unfortunate that the Board now promotes the idea that collective bargaining “imperils the protection of academic freedoms.” It is at this point, in 2020, a bizarre stance to hold, given the successful history of collective bargaining at the state level for decades. The argument included in the rule raises issues that either never appear in actual bargaining or is simply a defense of managerial prerogatives. That’s a strange position for the Board to emphasize, and one that supports the “freedom” of management to dictate terms to employees.

Graduate student employees will continue to organize and win improvements at work regardless of the Board’s decision, but we should be aware that the Board will be creating the conditions for rougher labor relations on campus. Indeed the dissenting opinion on the proposed rule anticipates this, stating that “today’s proposal will raise the specter of renewed unrest on campus. That result is directly contrary to the Act’s stabilizing purposes.”

There are tens of thousands of graduate student employees at private schools who are interested in organizing. The Board’s historic role is to protect the rights of employees to engage in concerted activity at work and encourage collective bargaining. Even if there is any doubt in this matter, and I argue there shouldn’t be, the Board should lean toward expanding rights rather than restricting them.

As universities move further toward a precarious workforce, with an increasing role for graduate student employees, I urge the Board to not take this drastic step of withdrawing collective bargaining rights from a large group of employees that properly deserves them.